The Disastrous Mrs. Weldon

by Brian Thompson

  Shortly after Lunn’s piece “Paper Reputations” Georgina published a flyer, intended as a reproof to her critics.

  1. To those wishing to know if Mr. Gounod gives lessons in singing or harmony:

  No, never, upon any consideration.

  2. To those wishing to know Mrs. Weldon’s terms for teaching grown up pupils or amateurs:

  £600 lodged in the London and Westminster Bank to Mrs. Weldon’s credit. In the case of a professional, the conditions are that he (or she) must remain for two years regularly training his (or her) voice under Mrs. Weldon’s superintendence. The £600 being sufficient to keep any young man or woman respectably for two years in London; the balance of that sum to be forfeited by the pupil should the engagement be broken by him (or her). An amateur would not be accepted on any terms except £600 down, and Mrs. Weldon hopes she may never have those terms accepted.

  3. To those wishing to ask Mr. Gounod’s opinion as to their own, or any other person’s musical capacity, voice, etc:

  Mr. Gounod can see no-one on this subject.

  4. To those wishing to know what Mrs. Weldon thinks on the same subject:

  Mrs. Weldon knows that if anyone chooses to practise conscientiously for two years under her supervision, any one can make a good deal of his (or her) voice and style. But Mrs. Weldon, from experience, is of the opinion that it is impossible for a grown up person to practise patiently for the time specified, and recommends everybody not to try it.

  The builders knocking bedrooms together, the orphans running about the house, the legal wrangles, and now the adult choir peering around the door. No sooner had the music room been established than she was forced to vacate it: Gounod, who worked above on the next floor, could not bear to hear the racket. It is dizzying to think of them all arguing, shouting, weeping, cursing. There seems to be nobody in charge, nobody to focus Georgina’s energies. What Harry did from day to day is perfectly understandable—he went to the College of Heralds, thence to the Garrick or to wherever he had hidden Annie Lowe. At night he came home and viewed the wreckage of his house with that peculiar dispassion Georgina had for so long mistaken as indolence. Harry was not a saint, as he was to prove, but he did have one saintly quality—a monumental forbearance. To the limit of his interest (and his own sketchy knowledge of how artists actually lived) he behaved supportively to them both. When Gounod was ill, he nursed him. He found money for Georgina’s ideas. On Sundays he suffered the company of people quite unlike himself and plied them with wine and refreshment paid for out of his own pocket. In this way, for example, he shook hands with the painter Degas.

  It was not true, as Wolff and Gounod’s other Parisian critics asserted, that Georgina had emasculated the composer’s talent. No one can say what might have happened had he reconciled himself to Anna—had he never fled the war, even—but he worked quite as hard in England as he would have done had he never met the scandalous and ridiculed Mrs. Weldon. “Old man has rewritten his Paternoster again . . . Old Man has composed a most beautiful song on the words of the Song of Solomon, ‘My beloved spake’ . . . Gounod composed a Biondina last night, lovely little Italian thing . . . Old man quite finished Jeanne d’Arc, three months and three days after he first saw the libretto . . .”

  The real story of Tavistock House is what Georgina did. The saddest thing of all about her is that everything she attempted was for a more or less high purpose—art, love, God. She thought she knew about these things, but she didn’t. She was an executant in an artist’s world, a nanny in the world of love, a Tory when it came to God. There was a strong element of calculation in her efforts to keep everyone happy. For as long as Gounod stayed, she was saved from the outright descent into nonentity. Her aristocratic connections had vanished completely. Nobody came to the house from the world she had left behind her, and she received no invitations from the people she had once claimed as dearest friends. All those doors were closed to her forever.

  The success she wished to make of her own talents was obstinately stalled. She was out of society but without the compensation of being accepted in the world of music. Over all that—all the frenzy and bustle of the last two years—hung a studious silence. Benedict, who had effected the introduction to Gounod, was mortified at the consequences. She had flirted with Clay, without ever understanding that his real loyalties were with Sullivan (they were bachelor friends), and of Sullivan she could not speak harshly enough. The few English musicians who came to the house—and they were few—came to see Gounod, not her. Nothing she did on her own account seemed to work. She was, in the eyes of her contemporaries—and now the courts—a willful and talentless woman who happened to harbor the rather aberrant French composer M. Gounod, but under such circumstances that it was impossible to speak of her in polite society.

  In the spring of 1873 the remnants of the Gounod Choir, augmented by the Weldon Choir, gave six concerts at St. James’s Hall, conducted by Gounod and once again comprising almost exclusively his own work. The promoter was a music publisher named Goddard. People came to these concerts because there was new work to be heard, of course, but the hall—on the site now occupied by the Piccadilly Hotel—was also the venue of two restaurants and a banqueting suite. The blackface troupe the Christy Minstrels performed in the second of the two auditoriums. Georgina was not the first person to travel west from Tavistock House to perform there—Dickens used it as a place to give his readings, the last in the year of his death, when he took his farewell of his audience amid scenes of frightening hysteria. The seats were hard, smells wafted up from the kitchens from time to time, and things were a long way from the opulent, but it was success of a kind, especially for her. Gounod was not so impressed. The choir was too small for the main auditorium, which seated two thousand, and Goddard insisted that it be spread wide on the stage to give the illusion of something bigger. Georgina took the solo soprano parts and her pupil Werranrath the tenor.

  There was talk of moving on from the Exeter to the newly reopened Alexandra Palace with this choir, and so enter into direct rivalry with the programs of music at the Crystal Palace. It was a characteristic piece of overreaching on her part, for at Crystal Palace could be heard performances at which the choir and orchestra alone numbered three thousand and all the principals were drawn from the Royal Italian Opera. Fortunately, providence saved her from yet another fiasco. Sixteen days after Alexandra Palace was opened in May, a hot coal fell from a workman’s bucket and the whole building was burned to the ground.

  The first enchantments of the relationship had long fled. Gounod’s towering rages, often followed by a headlong dash into the streets, came more frequently. The loaded revolver was referred to so often that on one occasion Georgina summoned the police to find him and fetch him home. They argued volcanically about nothing in particular: a hand of cards set them off on one occasion; in another month, criticism of the state of his trousers was the trigger. When they took Gallia to Spa, in Belgium, with Georgina as baggage master, she insisted that two of the dogs come along: Dan, the pug Harry had bought her when she lost the baby, and Tity, who was pregnant. They managed to get the choir to Spa without incident but then found they had left the dogs behind at the frontier. Georgina was distraught. Telegrams must be sent! Stationmasters must be alerted! The police must be mobilized! Gounod exploded.

  Those brutal dogs. Why have you brought them? Why submit ourselves to such a nuisance? All the better if they are lost! You, you can’t live without your pugs! Is there a thing in this world more insupportable than a woman who cannot move without dragging after her animals of all kinds, birds, beasts, parrots, frogs, tortoises, hedgehogs? If they are found I insist on your opening their basket and letting them run wherever they please! As for me, if those pugs darken our doors again, I take the first train, I return to Tavistock and you’ll do the season at Spa without me!

  7

  Gounod was too selfish, Harry too indifferent, to channel all her wild energy into a plan, a scheme, a campaign. Some of th
e lesser lights of Tavistock House could not take it and left. Georgina had been training up a young soprano, Nita Gaetano, who used her time at Tavistock House to trap a certain Captain Moncrieffe. Shortly after, she forsook the world of music for marriage without a backward glance. In time George Werranrath left too, taking himself off to America. Among those that remained, there were shocking and unsubstantiated rumors that some of the orphans died and were buried in the garden, alongside (when old age at last claimed him) Dan the pug. The worst of these accusations suggested that bowls of poison had been left out for the children to eat like rats. None of this bothered her. She had an enviable capacity for remaining deaf to what she considered petty and unimportant criticisms. Unlike Gounod, she could not be depressed. Unlike Harry, she could not play the waiting game. She had no understanding of music as an organized profession and no inclination to acquire it. Like many people without a sense of humor, she compensated for the lack of one by a joshing clumsiness. We get the clear sense that she was driven, but only in the way a boisterous and stubborn child might said to be driven by an obsession with some small aspect of life—a collection, say, or a desire to visit the zoo. Like a child’s, her world existed outside of time. She was a woman without a real perspective of where she wanted to go.

  Her unquenchable and scattergun wildness made her infuriating to deal with but did not necessarily indicate that she was mad. One of the niceties of nineteenth-century thought was that only God was held to be of sound mind. What was unsound about Georgina had lost her all her society friends—those that she genuinely had, as, for example, the good-natured Catherine Gladstone—and made her a laughingstock in the narrow world of London choirs. But what was that? There was a sliding scale of mental instability that certainly led in one direction to the private asylum, but included along the way every kind of quirk and oddity. The men who decided what was lunatic behavior were not doctors, but husbands. The laws of property and inheritance dictated terms. On the medical side it was commonly held that women were prone to lunacy through some connection between hysteria and the womb. What took the place of counseling and therapy in the case of many disturbed unmarried women was the speculum. A male doctor opened the cervix with a crude piece of stainless steel and looked for answers in the shadows of the womb. Among married women the husband was the judge.

  All in all, Georgina was no more disturbed than Gounod. The difference between them was nothing to do with sanity, but talent. He could go away into a room—even a room without a piano—and externalize his feelings on a few pages of music paper. He was a maker where she was not. The whole house, the whole circus, was her arena, and in it no one thing was better than another. Else how could she be running an orphanage, organizing a choir, seeking individual pupils, and talking of a scheme to found a national training school? Ideas were drawn from a well that never emptied. One bucket was as pure and wholesome as the next. It all depended on how you felt when you woke up. Nothing was impossible. In her life, what was spilled or wasted could be refreshed without loss. She shared with Gounod an exasperation with other people and a deep sense of being unjustly persecuted. It had dragged them through the courts and led to explosive relationships with publishers and agents. However, in his case, vain though he was, he could admit at least sometimes that the fault lay with him. Such self-reproach was foreign to Georgina. It never entered her mind.

  8

  In November 1873 Gounod wrote to a Frenchwoman who was a member of the Queen’s household.

  Dear Mlle Norele,

  I have composed and written myself the poem of a great sacred trilogy, entitled The Redemption.

  The music of this composition is the most important work of my life. I offer to dedicate it to Her Majesty Queen Victoria. I ask Her Majesty’s gracious patronage and confidently await Her Majesty’s commands for the first execution of The Redemption in the Royal Albert Hall.

  I will now give my reasons for wishing this. I had hoped to found in this Hall, which is the most beautiful and magnificent one in Europe, and which is dedicated to the memory of a venerated and revered Prince, a great Institution devoted to Sacred Music. I have been shamefully expulsed, iniquitously turned out of the position of Founder-Director to which I had been appointed. I feel, and I know that I am truly inspired to say, that I am worthy of fulfilling this mission through my faithful and religious love for my divine art. I have the profoundest contempt for the illnatured plot of which I have been the object: but nothing will make me forget the great artistic future of the Royal Albert Hall which has been my dream. I wish to re-enter there with a work worthy of the place and of the name it bears, and this must be by the Queen’s own hand.

  Every single note of this (which incidentally bears strong traces of Georgina’s composition) is falsely struck. Gounod was not turned out of his post, but left it of his own accord. The “Institution” the letter mentions was in greater part a commercial booking agency. “Gounod’s choir” was at least half, in terms of personnel, Barnby’s choir. It would not need much knowledge of the London music scene on Mlle Norele’s part to know that Joseph Barnby had for twelve years been music adviser to the firm of Novello & Co. and was now confirmed as director of the Royal Albert Hall Choir, which Gounod had so lamentably let fall. The “contempt” Gounod felt for the “illnatured plot” was hardly silent—the whole issue of the Albert Hall and its musical policy was being vigorously aired in a paper called the Cosmopolitan, under the vitriolic pen of someone named Mrs. Weldon. When this was pointed out to Gounod in Mlle Norele’s reply, he denied all knowledge of it.

  Georgina now wrote a letter to Mlle Norele under her own signature. She confessed to having written the offending articles but indicated she would be perfectly prepared to withdraw them in return for royal patronage of a “National Training School of Music in South Kensington,” of which she would feature as principal director. Taking these letters together, both written from the same address, we see a peculiar and murky picture emerge for consideration by the Queen’s advisers. The composer Gounod may well have taken it into his head to ask permission to dedicate a work to the Queen. That was a simple enough request, of a kind often made; nor was it completely out of the question that Victoria might graciously consent. The soupier and more sentimental elements in Gounod’s music appealed to her. In his letter there were some disagreeable remarks concerning others that he had no business to make, but that could perhaps be put down to his nationality.

  Georgina’s letter was different. Leaving aside the veiled threat of blackmail, the writer of this letter seemed not to have been aware that a National Training School had been mooted since 1854, nor that the Queen’s second son, the gallant naval officer and passionate violinist the Duke of Edinburgh, had recently chaired a public meeting in which it was agreed to form one. Moreover, the writer of this letter describes Sullivan as “a little gentleman teeming with bad manners and impudence,” not knowing—or not caring—that he it was who had already been offered the directorship of the new school by the royal Duke and his committee. Mlle Norele made some discreet inquiries about the relationship between Gounod and the mysterious Mrs. Weldon and was shocked enough by what she heard to bring the correspondence to an abrupt end.

  Whether she was ignorant of the birth pangs of what in fifteen years’ time would become the Royal Academy of Music or whether she knew of the baby and merely wished to replace it with one of her own, either way Georgina had caused Gounod’s London reputation a further shattering blow. For as long as he remained connected to her in the public imagination, his standing would always be compromised. In Paris he was being spoken of by his colleagues as “the Englishman Gounod.” The strain became too great. He started to suffer what Georgina called “cerebral attacks,” which no amount of hydropathy could cure. In one of the more touching episodes of his stay in England, Harry took him off to the Royal Saxon Hotel, Margate, where they walked the promenade and took the sea air. Perhaps he, first among the three of them, saw that Gounod could not take
any more. The Frenchman, bowed and elderly beyond his years, was exhausted, not by love, or even by work, but by endless niggling controversy. He had made it clear to Anna Gounod in terms strictly overseen by Georgina that he was prepared to live as man and wife again, provided it was in England and she accepted the Weldons as his friends. This she was not prepared to do. She saw that Gounod wanted what he had always believed possible—to remain a man of honor and at the same time enjoy the kind of quasi-sexual adulation that could only do him harm. She refused to accommodate him. She would not come to London; he must return to Paris.

  Harry was sympathetic but noncommittal. He had his own secrets, which he was certainly not about to divulge to Gounod. It makes a pretty picture, the two of them with their canes and cigars, wandering along the promenade. In the end Gounod seems almost closer to Harry than to Harry’s wife. Some of the exile’s kindlier thoughts on the English applied as much to the husband as to the turbulent Georgina:

  The friendship of English people has the particular quality of not only being invariable in its constancy, but indefatigable in its activity. It is not a friendship which folds its arms, and is content with smiling at you when it meets you or when it wants you; it is a certain friendship which will not pay by a joke the pleasure of pulling you to pieces between friends; it is a courageous friendship which neither disguises its feelings nor its convictions, and with which one knows what one is about . . .