BY MADELINE ROYCROFT
In the wise words of Stravinsky: “In order to create there must be a dynamic force, and what force is more potent than love?”.
From unrealistic happily-ever-afters to tragic deaths of female protagonists, classical music has it all. When the music is brimming with love stories from all ends of the spectrum, it’s hardly surprising that life should imitate art.
Still, life is full of guilty pleasures, isn’t it? So sit back, relax, and let us take you on a journey through the most intense, passionate and unusual love affairs played out by your favourite composers.
10. Igor Stravinsky and Coco Chanel
The outbreak of World War I meant Stravinsky was unable to collect royalties from earlier Ballets Russes productions, and by 1920 his family was suffering financial difficulties. Seven years after meeting at the premiere of The Rite of Spring, Coco Chanel invited the composer’s whole family to stay at her suburban mansion in Garches, Paris. It is here that their alleged affair took place, under the noses of Stravinsky’s wife (who was slowly dying of tuberculosis) and four children.
Stravinsky never admitted to their sneaky relationship, but Chanel spilled the beans to a biographer in 1946, who only published the story after the composer and couturier had both died 30 years later (strangely, within a few months of each other). Honestly, it’s unclear whether there’s any truth to this story – but it makes for damn good viewing in the 2009 film adaption Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky, which we recommend watching if only for the opening dramatisation of the riot at The Rite premiere.
9. Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms
A lesson in pure restraint, the Brahms-Schumann sort-of-but-not-really love triangle continues to mystify. In 1853, the young Brahms was welcomed into the Schumann family home and developed a close personal friendship with Clara, 14 years his senior. After Robert Schumann’s attempted suicide and subsequent admission to the Endenich Bonn sanatorium, Brahms moved into the lodging above the Schumann’s in order to help Clara and the children at home. Two months before Robert’s death, Brahms wrote to Clara:
“I wish I could write to you as tenderly as I love you, and do as many good things for you, as you would like. You are so infinitely dear to me that I can hardly express it. I should like to call you darling and lots of other names, without ever getting enough of adoring you.”
Brahms never married, and Clara remained widowed for the rest of her life. Just sayin’.
8. Giacomo Puccini and Elvira Gemignani
“On the day when I am no longer in love, you can hold my funeral.” Puccini had a knack for writing heartbreaking opera, with female characters often inspired by muses from his expansive love life. Unfortunately, his long-time mistress Elvira was hardly tolerant of the Tuscan maestro’s unruly behaviour and in 1909, accused him of an affair with Doria Manfredi, one of their housekeepers. While standing out the front of Villa Puccini, Elvira screamed insults at the young maid and threatened to drown her in the lake. Several days later, Doria chose to swallow rat poison. When her autopsy revealed she was in fact a virgin, Madame Puccini was sentenced to jail for defamation and slander. It was later revealed that the woman Elvira saw her husband with was actually Doria’s cousin, Giulia. Not good.
7. Alma Mahler and…everyone?
Composer, socialite, and veritable slayer of men Alma Schindler had many romantic ventures in her life: some of the earliest being with artist Gustav Klimt, and composers Alexander von Zemlinsky and Gustav Mahler. While the latter was the most high profile of her relationships, it was also the most stifling – a term of Alma’s marriage to Mahler was that she give up composing for home duties (mmm, that’s a no from me).
Later in their marriage, she began an inevitable affair with Walter Gropius (a young architect she met at a spa). She married him in 1915, four years after her husband’s death and immediately after a two-year affair with artist Oscar Kokoschka. They agreed to divorce within a year and in 1920 she married Austrian writer Franz Werfel.
In case you’ve missed the pattern here, Alma’s superpower was evidently sucking out the souls of artists, and her powerful legacy lives on in the myriad artworks these passionate affairs inspired.
6. Claude Debussy and Lilly Texier
The posterboy for French Impressionism had several tempestuous affairs throughout his life, the most extreme being with fashion model Lilly Texier. Debussy’s previous lover Gaby Dupont had been a friend of Lilly’s, and he only ended their nine-year relationship when Lilly threatened to commit suicide if he refused to marry her. Like any reasonable musical genius, Debussy eventually became so frustrated by Lilly’s musical ineptitude that he sent her to visit her father so he could secretly holiday with Emma Bardac, the mother of one of his piano students (noooo).
Upon their return, Debussy wrote to Lilly that their marriage was over. She attempted suicide by standing in the middle of Place de la Concorde and shooting herself in the chest with a revolver. As if this story couldn’t get any more outrageous, Lilly lived for another three decades with the bullet lodged in a vertebra under her left breast.
5. Don Carlo Gesualdo and Donna Maria D’Avalos
Italian renaissance composer and royal prince of Venosa Don Carlo Gesualdo is known today not only for writing highly chromatic vocal music that was well ahead of his time, but also for the intensely perverted manner in which he murdered his wife.
After years of seemingly happy marriage, Gesualdo’s wife (and first cousin) Donna Maria D’Avalos naively began an affair with the Duke of Andria. Unfortunately, the composer caught his wife in the act in the bedroom of his own house. Neapolitan officials found Donna’s body the following day, draped on the bed with her throat cut and her nightshirt drenched in blood. On the ground next to her lay the once handsome Duke, his corpse dressed in Donna’s silk nightgown and covered in burns, gunshot and stab wounds. Although Gesualdo’s noble status protected him from imprisonment, his guilt became unbearable later in life so he hired servants to whip him thrice daily…as you do.
4. Hector Berlioz and Harriet Smithson and Marie Recio
When Berlioz first saw Harriet playing Ophelia in an 1827 production of Hamlet, it was love at first sight. The Shakespearian actress was bombarded with love letters from the composer, who filled his seminal Symphonie Fantastique with repetitions of a musical theme she inspired. The only problem was, the two had never actually met. Only after attending a performance of the Symphonie in 1832 did Harriet realise it was about her, and she felt compelled to meet her long-time admirer.
The couple wed the following year and (unsurprisingly) endured several bitter years of marriage before the collapse of Harriet’s acting career, combined with her jealousy of Berlioz’ success, turned her to alcoholism and the couple to inevitable separation. Yet, Berlioz would financially support Harriet for the rest of her life; in 1848 he hired four people to look after her when a series of strokes left her paralysed. It was only after Harriet’s death in 1854 that Berlioz married his mistress of 10 years, Marie Recio.
Bizarrely, before the cemetery in which Harriet was buried closed down, Berlioz had her remains moved to Montmartre, meaning the composer and his two wives now lie side by side in Montmartre Cemetery. Weird…
3. Francis Poulenc and Richard Chanlaire
Struggling to accept his sexual identity, Poulenc asked his female friend Raymonde Linossier to marry him, but she turned him down apparently due to his self-proclaimed “Parisian sexuality”. This gave Poulenc the reality check he needed to act upon the first known homosexual affair of his life, with painter Richard Chanlaire. Poulenc dedicated his Concert champêtre to Chanlaire, writing: “You have changed my life, you are the sunshine of my thirty years, a reason for living and working”. Beginning in the late ‘20s, their affair would last until 1931 (even though Poulenc once described the fine artist as his “sole raison d’être” for living). They remained friends, even after the composer had commenced his next relationship with a chauffeur (who was, coincidentally, named Raymond).
2. Erik Satie and Suzanne Valadon
By no means the craziest on the list, Erik Satie’s six-month affair with painter Suzanne Valadon is perhaps the most profound. During the brief period in which they lived next-door to each another, Satie became obsessed with Valadon, proposing marriage on their first night together. Even though she declined, a steady flow of impassioned love notes about her “lovely eyes, gentle hands, and tiny feet” ensued.
Satie also composed an odd, four-bar setting of Valadon’s pet name, Biqui. When she abruptly moved away, Satie was left heartbroken, with “nothing but an icy loneliness that fills the head with emptiness and the heart with sadness”. But the love letters would continue for another 30 years.
After his death in 1925, the iconic portraits Satie and Valadon had painted of each other were the only items found hanging on his wall, suggesting this was the only romantic relationship Satie ever had.
1. Percy and Ella Grainger
Equal parts wholesome and disturbing, Percy and Ella’s marriage was undeniably intense. As anyone who has visited Melbourne’s Grainger Museum will recall, amongst the variety of manuscripts, recordings, photos and inventions on display, we can also view the Lust Branch: a collection of pornography, whips, and clothing from the Graingers’ sexual encounters. While many photographs are of Grainger’s self-flagellation, others depict Ella evidently sharing her husband’s enthusiasm for bondage.
Grainger’s proclivity for S&M apparently began at age 16, and his love of the whip is well documented not only in the museum’s collection (some are fashioned out of conducting batons!) but also in an intriguing love letter he wrote to Ella in 1928:
“As far as my taste goes, blows are most thrilling on breasts, bottom, inner thighs, sexparts.”
It is supposed that Grainger’s desire for sexual punishment resulted from the questionable relationship he had with his mother Rose, with whom he shared a bed until age 36. Enough said.
Did you listen to the ABC Classic 100 – Love countdown on the weekend? Check out the boxed set to learn more about works of love, heartbreak, and passion by Australian and international composers throughout history.
Composer images: public domain. Featured image Mo Riza via Flickr CC-BY-2.0.
