Antonietta, page 12
By the time the agent reached London on the Hirondelle, Drummer Boy had dropped anchor in Southampton and Antonietta had been carted with the rest of the booty up to London. The violin was sold at a grubby public auction to a music-hall fiddler for two pounds. This man, who was named Chauster, played in a public house every night after his work at the music hall was done, drank several growlers of stout, and, tottering home drunk, slept with the fiddle—literally took it under the covers with him in bed. He never cleaned the resin off the strings or the belly. By day he smoked hideous Indian cheroots. He was unable to get much out of the violin. Its A string kept going out of tune; whatever he tried, he couldn’t seem to make the tuning peg hold properly. The fiddle’s tone was thin and cranky. (Small wonder! A choppy English Channel crossing [violins have been known to be “seasick” long after damp and violent sea voyages]; a crash onto a pirate deck; an owner with dirty hands and the breath of a hyena playing scratchy music-hall ditties with an out-of-tune string; a nightly curing in tobacco smoke in a pub, repeated by day in damp and chilly digs; unclean, unloved, misunderstood.) Slovenly Chauster, making atrocious noises on the violin, eventually lost his music-hall job. In order to eat he took the fiddle to a pawnshop, where he got a ticket and one pound six bob.
On a long chance, the pawnbroker took the dirty fiddle to a violin shop he heard about on Brandon Road, by the Newington Causeway, Southwark, belonging to one Henry Lockey Hill. Hill, the reigning member of a distinguished family of luthiers, had learned his craft working for the Bettses, and he had recently heard all about the “lost” Antonietta from one of their apprentices. He recognized the instrument at once and bought it from the delighted hocker for five pounds.
Hill lovingly restored the violin. It had a tiny crack in the back (perhaps from the blow of landing on Drummer Boy’s deck), which he repaired. Having been told about the famous nick at the edge of the purfling on the belly, he left it unpatched. When the instrument was whole and sound and glistening again, he advertised it—shrewdly, knowing that the Bettses might stake a claim—on the Continent, and before long he sold it to the Paris violinmaker and dealer Vuillaume for one hundred pounds.
Vuillaume had had Antonietta in his shop for only four days when in came the violinist Pierre Baillot, looking for a great instrument. Then in his mid-forties, Baillot had in his sights the peak of a brilliant career, and he felt ready to step up from a faux Stradivari, a handsome imitation made by Vuillaume himself, to the real thing. Baillot had played, early in the century, in Napoleon’s private orchestra; he had toured Russia with great success twice; had a few years earlier led sensational chamber concerts in Paris, praised by Mendelssohn among others; and he was now fresh back from triumphs in Belgium, Holland, and England. With the backing of a benefactor of the Paris Opéra who was pushing him for the honored leadership of the Opéra orchestra, he bought Antonietta for six thousand francs, a price which gave Vuillaume a ninety-percent markup.
Having been told some of what had happened to Antonietta, Baillot realized that the instrument would be out of sorts, and it took him several weeks to coax it back to a full, round, clean tone. He did land the Opéra post, and later he became concurrently the leader of the Chapelle Royale at Versailles. He also gave solo recitals and led a quartet, which bore his name, in frequent appearances. Playing the Stradivari, he was universally praised for the pure, noble tone he produced—a tone which was also said, however, to be piquantly disturbing, much as (various listeners remarked after hearing it) brandy, strong snuff, a daring décolletage, candied ginger, a stolen kiss, chutney, Egyptian perfume, a guardsman’s mustaches, a flirt’s pout, or (as one even said) the velvet curtains in the windows of a bordello might be felt to be disturbing. Baillot took tender care of Antonietta.
Act Three
1830
Music is memory, he says. Most of us have associations, usually nostalgic, that click into place when we hear certain tunes, but with Berlioz the connection is so much more intense that he states it in this extravagant way, as an absolute equivalence. Something happened the other day that bears this out, at least in one sense. He asked me to play some passages from his Francs-Juges overture, and when I had finished, I waited as usual for him to start reminiscing.
He said, “I have a pain in my foot.”
I asked, “Did you turn your ankle?”
“Yes,” he said, “I did. Two and a half years ago.”
“And it still hurts?”
“No. It only hurts when I hear that music.”
He then told me that when he was writing Francs-Juges, he was unsure of the capabilities of some of the instruments. Having written a trombone solo in the overture in the key of D-flat, he began to worry that that would be difficult to play, so he showed the passage to a trombonist at the Opéra, who assured him that D-flat was an ideal key for the instrument and that the passage would be splendid. Going home, Berlioz was so happy with this outcome that he “walked on air, in a daze of joy,” not watching his step, and he stumbled on a curb and sprained his ankle. Now—and this will probably be so for the rest of his life, he says—whenever he hears themes from the overture, his foot hurts.
The tie between music and memory works for him in another and a much more important way, however. It seems that when certain images from the past come to him, some sort of crossover from the visual to the aural takes place in his mind, and he begins to hear strains of music. And sometimes when he hears music played that he loves—either of his own or by others—visual memories come to him, which in turn generate new music. This feeds into his process of composition, and this, of course, is where I come in.
We met for the first time last year, under circumstances that made him take to me. It was at a recital of my string ensemble, at which we had the appalling audacity to play Beethoven’s then rather recent C-sharp-minor quartet,* which Parisians had never heard. As you know, some of our Paris musical establishment considers Beethoven a barbarian savage. Just the year before, Habeneck had put on Beethoven’s Third, Fifth, and Seventh symphonies at the Conservatoire, to howls of protest from the “patriots” in the audiences—but not from twenty-five-year-old Berlioz, who was, he says, electrified, transported, inspired.
He came to my recital already admiring me, he later told me. A fanatical devotee of Gluck, he said he had praised me to friends one night at the Opéra because, virtuoso or not, I did not consider myself above sitting in the orchestra and playing routine accompaniments to Alceste, and he told them to listen for a passage I would be playing on the G-string that they would be able to hear right through all the rest of the ensemble. (He didn’t know then about my eloquent violin.) And he had also been present on the night of the Nina riot, when it had been announced on posters that I was to play the solo in the ballet but I was ill and had to cancel at the last moment—which the management failed to announce. When the scene was almost over and I had not played, listeners began to shout, “Baillot! Baillot! The violin solo!” The entire audience got to its feet, the curtain fell, the orchestra members fled, and the infuriated crowd poured into the orchestra pit and threw down the music stands and smashed a double bass and ripped open the kettledrums.
There were about two hundred present the day of our Beethoven recital. We were not halfway through the first movement of that chaotic but magisterial quartet when I could hear coughs and programs rustling and then people talking out loud. Finally almost all of the audience, outraged beyond tolerance, simply stood up and walked out. But Berlioz was one of a tiny group that stayed and heard us right to the end. Afterward he came up to me, slowly shaking his head like a person under a spell. His eye fell on the Cupid on the tailpiece of my violin, and he suddenly squinted as if in pain, and the only words he spoke to me were “I am hopelessly in love.”
I had heard from friends at the Conservatoire that the flamboyant young student Berlioz was given to high-flown language, and at the time I thought he meant that he had lost his head and his heart to this mysterious music he had just sat through. But rumors I have picked up since then from those same Conservatoire friends have made me think that something else—and something rather peculiar—was on his mind.
He came to me about two weeks ago with a bizarre proposal. He said he is about to compose his first major work—“a monstrous dramatic symphony”—and he wondered whether I would enjoy doing him a very great kindness. I was charmed by the shameless vanity in his choice of the word “enjoy.” I was the one who was to get pleasure from the favor! Would I be willing to come, he asked, two or three mornings a week, or more often if it pleased me, to play on my violin for him for just a few minutes each day, and then to chat with him? This would be an enormous help to him, he said, in his work. It would stir up memories, the images of which would stimulate his emotions and start the day’s flow of melodies in his mind. He was asking me to serve him a daily mental apéritif!
He then turned on a stream of most eloquent flattery. You would have thought that there had never been such a great violinist as Baillot. (Alas, I know that is untrue because—Dieu sauve mon âme—I have heard Paganini. When he played violent pizzicati with his left hand while still bowing with his right, and when he poured out unbelievable trills of octave double stops and mad runs of whistling harmonics, I thought I was hearing Beelzebub playing a fiddle. I covered my face with my hands and wept.) For his own part, young Berlioz went on to say with bland assurance that he was going to be a great composer, and he begged me to become, in this way, a patron who would help him on the road to his first great success. In other words, my doing him a favor would bring fame to me.
I must confess that I was fascinated by the preposterousness of this young man’s invitation and by the reach of his conceit. I am old enough to be his father—he tells me he is twenty-six years old—and though I am not quite Paganini I am very much in demand, yet he seemed to expect that I would jump at the chance to take the time, perhaps every morning “if it pleased me,” to massage his naïve gifts. Inwardly laughing, I told him I would have to think about it.
As it happens, Berlioz’s principal teacher of composition at the Conservatoire, Jean-François Le Sueur, is an old friend of mine, and I told him about the amusing visit I had had from the young tyro. Le Sueur startled me by clutching at my shoulders with his hands and shouting excitedly, shaking me, “You must do it! You must do it!” He spoke then so earnestly of the gushing, turbulent talent of his pupil—fashioning music that Le Sueur both hates and honors, “music that in defiance of my teaching will bring glory to France”—that I was completely turned around. It happens that I have very few engagements for the next month or two, and moreover this is a period when I have been rather bored and restless—and…well…the upshot is…I go to him three or four times a week.
We meet in the small room he rents a couple of streets away from the Conservatoire. It is shabbily furnished; there are no curtains at the windows. Berlioz composes, without the use of a piano, at a scarred and rickety table. He has swiped a music stand from the Conservatoire for me to use, and each day he sets some music on it for me to perform. Often the sheets before me will be orchestra or opera scores, from which he expects me to pick out the significant melodies, from whatever instrument or voice, and make fluent sense of a passage. This is an exercise I do rather enjoy.
While I play, he lounges on his bed against the wall on the street side of the room. He wears an ordinary workman’s clothes: a long-sleeved linen shirt, a gray vest tied at his waist with a broad sash, a bandanna at his throat, and, on chilly days, a floppy cloth cap on his head. Berlioz has a huge arching blade of a nose, piercing brown eyes underlined with signs of insomnia, a generous mouth, and an enormous crown of curly hair that cascades down into copious sideburns. When he makes a sudden movement of his head, on days when he is not wearing his cap, this wonderful hair shakes out sparks of reddish light.
When I took my violin out of the case at our first appointment, I found myself drenched, whether I liked it or not, in Berlioz’s rapturous intensity. He asked me if he might hold the instrument in his hands for a few moments. His eyes hungrily devoured every sweet morsel of its beauty, saving for dessert the mother-of-pearl design of the Cupid. Then, handing the violin back to me, he said, “I have never seen the sea—except there, on the back of your instrument! How lucky you are! I hear the music of the wind on those waves! I myself play the flute, my instrument is that of the forest, of birdsong—quite by chance I began playing the flute. When I was a child, I found an old flageolet one day in a drawer, and I tooted on it so endlessly and annoyingly that my father in despair bought me a flute to take its place, and he gave me Devienne’s book of instructions to teach myself by. But I was always in awe of the violin. My uncle, my mother’s brother Félix Marmion, was a guardsman for Napoleon, a crimson uniform, huge mustaches!—he played the violin. He lived recklessly, he was cut on the cheek by a saber in Spain, he sped from campaign to campaign—Prussia, Poland—wounded by a gunshot in the foot in Prussia and a lance in the side in Poland, always carrying his violin with him and playing it for glory after each battle. And he played for us, too, when he visited—the violin brought wars, bravery, blood right into our parlor! When my father finally gave in to my begging and hired a musician to teach me the flute, he picked a violinist from the Lyons orchestra, a man named Imbert—and my happiest times were listening to him play his violin for me—he brought me the trees astir in the woods, he brought me on his E string the majestic far crests of the Alps of the Dauphiné. And when my father tried to force me to step into his shoes as a doctor and sent me off to study medicine, bribing me with a new flute, my companion and roommate in Paris was my cousin Alphonse Robert—he, too, a violinist. He brought me sublime relief from cadavers. Ah, Baillot, you will help me! We will do wonders together!”
Carried along like a drowning man on this flood of emotion, I began, as quietly as I could, to tell Berlioz some of the reasons why I love my violin. I spoke of the shades of tone it can give me—all the way from the subtleties of shot silk and thin crystal to a thick, chocolaty sound, and even cries of pain, if needed, though it could never growl or snarl, never be rude or cruel. I said the violin was equally at home with Eine kleine Nachtmusik and the harsh Beethoven quartet that Berlioz had sat all the way through; with Vivaldi and with Gluck; with Bach and with Weber. I told him that I am so respectful of my instrument, which is now a hundred and thirty years old and getting stronger every year, that I cannot think of myself as its owner, but only as its temporary custodian.
All this Berlioz took in with a kind of reined-in patience, as if he could hardly wait to speak himself and only heard me out as a courtesy. But he sat up straight, with an expression of a mischievous small boy, when I told him the stories I had heard from the dealer Vuillaume about the British pirates, and the drunken music-hall fiddler in London, and the pawnshop owner’s profit. Then I told him that the violin had a name. Antonietta. According to the legend Vuillaume passed on to me, I said, it was named for a woman with whom the great Stradivari had fallen in love at first sight on the day he began making the violin, and whom he never saw again all the time he was working on it.
I was unable to finish the story. Berlioz leaped up off the edge of his bed, the blood drained from his face, and cried out in a kind of groan, “Sacré nom de Dieu, the Cupid, I understand!” Then, pacing back and forth, he shouted, “Play for me, Baillot! Play!”
I tuned up. He sat on the edge of the bed, leaning forward tensely.
He had put on the music stand Giulia’s prayer, “Tu che invoco con orrore,” from the second act of Spontini’s La Vestale, the fervid, sweeping phrases of which I played with a tremulous bel canto tone. When I had finished, I tucked the violin under my arm and turned to see how Berlioz had responded to his first hearing of what Antonietta had to say. He was unashamedly weeping. I was both thrilled and embarrassed.
FIRST MOVEMENT
This morning I found on the music stand, ready for my reading of it, the aria “O malheureuse Iphigénie,” from Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride. We have been at “our work,” as Berlioz calls it, for a fortnight. He tells me he is well into the first movement of his symphony, but so far he has been unwilling to show me any of it.
I tuned Antonietta and played the melody of the aria.
When I came to the end, Berlioz remained, as on other mornings, silent for a long time—a time that I have come to think of as the hush of the final snowfall of feeling which adds just enough weight to the drifts on the steep mountainsides of this man’s emotions to cause an avalanche. Of words. And here it came.
“That violin has the voice of Iphigenia! Of course the great thing about Gluck was his making the voice, the words in their natural cadence, what counted. Unhappy Iphigenia, there she stood before me in all her misery, Baillot, in my poor room! Thank you! That violin shakes me. How do you make it speak so exactly with Gluck’s spirit? I’ve been a Gluckist, you know, since first I heard his music. He broke with all that Italian operatic fountainwork and gave us simple speech in his airs, almost as if he were writing English ballads. I organized a claque, you know….Listen to me.”
