In a time where most western training singers, composers, instrumentalists or even conductors are set foot in a comfortable life almost from birth, it has become a cliché to talk of the young not having sufficient ‘artistic experience.’ This doesn’t signify that they are lacking in performance experience, or even in training experience, or even in strength of their instrument or imagination. But it has been an age-old suggestion that because the aged or ‘older’ are more familiar with emotion and suffering, the young are ‘too young’ to sing the role of Tosca, or to write their first concerto, or even to understand the feelings of a symphony or opera.
However much one can go round the carousel of applying this to artists and end-up getting various results and however many outcomes, it is worth seeing whether any of the most remembered, valued, talented artists were especially tainted with pain in their lives so that they could write or play. It’s legend to talk of the genius’s suffering. But why should this refer to suffering that would stem from one’s personal life? The reader or watcher associates ‘suffering’ with the tragedy of losing one’s mother or Tchaikovsky’s struggle to live with his homosexuality. Little do they know that geniuses do not necessarily suffer because they have lives that are so tragically unfair; most of all they suffer because they are geniuses.
Undoubtedly there are arguments for and against. At the age of fifteen, Margot Fonteyn had already been training in ballet for ten years. She was already under the guise of Ninette de Valois, the Founder of the Royal Ballet, and was desperate to dance Giselle. One of her biographers, Meredith Daneman, implied that Valois was cynical over Fonteyn’s ability to perform Giselle because of her lack of experience, and that it was because of this that Fonteyn’s love life began so early. At that same age she found herself a lover, the average middle-class married man, started a relationship, got hurt, and ended-up dancing Giselle beautifully, according to Daneman. But that isn’t to say that Fonteyn danced beautifully because she started her relations with men so early. Not every fifteen year-old ballet dancer who’d happened to have got herself a lover would have given to the public a sublime Giselle. Others will argue, quite rightly, that Fonteyn was ‘rejuvenated’ by Nureyev, who brought out the spark in her dancing because they were lovers. Lovers they probably were; but even Fonteyn’s closest friends had other ways of describing her ‘rebirth’ in ballet at the age of forty-two. Nureyev was a dictator with her, forcing her to change her ways of even pirouetting. The technicalities are different to comprehend for the non-dancer, but it’s well known to those watching in rehearsals that Nureyev would even ask Fonteyn to move her hip another way to ease her way of doing fouettés, or whatever was required. Love and passion are great inspirers for the artist – but they’re hardly everything.
Brahms famously lived his life in love with a woman who, some would say, was never his. He pined and indeed wrote for Clara Schumann, wife of Robert, who represented not less than a goddess to him. She was, as common knowledge goes for most, his greatest muse, and his love for her was almost boundless. He wrote that he could ‘no longer exist without her’, and of his desire to touch her, even whilst her husband – a man of whom Brahms was in awe – was still alive. Several Brahms studiers have noted even that he had a ‘Clara theme’ in several of his pieces for piano, whereby he somehow composed a musical leitmotif from attaching the letters of her name in a pattern for the keyboard. It was only reportedly when Clara at last offered herself to him after Schumann’s death that he rejected her – probably from the notion that a goddess was not to be loved in that way. But even in the knowledge of this torturous love, could it be true to suppose that his music stemmed entirely from her? Clara Schumann was in some people’s opinions a genius by herself. Schumann envied her piano mastery compared to his own, and Brahms looked at her as though she were high above his measly ‘composer’ status. But look at the pieces Brahms wrote in the earlier stages of his life. Piano Concerto No. 1 was written when Brahms was just twenty-six; already experienced in love but still at an age that many would call ‘tender’. His first Piano Sonata was completed six years earlier. It would be stupid to suppose that Clara fed Brahms’ genius. Rather that Brahms’ genius fed on her.
The misconception that geniuses are geniuses greatly because of their suffering comes from the average human being’s failure to understand the genius’s mentality. Of course not all geniuses would have the same mentality, but whatever or whoever they were, they are consciously or subconsciously aware of their artistic duty. Whether they are known perfectionists or simply feel fear before God or Fate, they realise that they have to not only give their work their ‘all’, but that their ‘all’ has to be approximately three-hundred per cent of what any other musician’s ‘all’ is. Tchaikovsky may have suffered somewhat unceasingly from his marriage to the revolting Antonina Miliukova, but his quest in life was not to break out of this marriage. He famously wrote: ‘Truly there would be no reason to go mad were it not for music’, and tortured himself incessantly over the creation of his works. He predicted that his 1812 overture would be of ‘no artistic worth’, and he wrote of his struggles on the Manfred Symphony: ‘The symphony has turned out to be huge, serious, difficult, absorbing all my time, sometimes to utter exhaustion.’
What’s almost out of reach of the average mentality is that geniuses live within themselves. Their reasons for being and highest targets in life come entirely from themselves, since they do not want mostly to be married, or have children, or be famous. They want to produce from within something that will last and something that will reach the pinnacle of artistry. Schumann once said: ‘You set a goal, which once it is attained, is no longer a goal. So you aim higher and higher. Failure is then almost inevitable.’ This is the real struggle of a genius.
Of course a genius’ life does play some part in it. According to the rules of Fate, or God, whichever way one puts it – if Mozart and Beethoven and even someone like Sibelius were born for the purpose of leaving us this beautiful, infinitely lasting music, then surely their lives have to turn out in such a way that they will eventually write this music. It’s not entirely ironic that Mahler’s Adagietto from his Fifth Symphony is for the majority of uneducated music-listeners the only Mahler piece they recognise. It was written at the peak of his love for his first lover then wife, Alma Schindler. The extent to which it differs from his other works and even from the other movements of the symphony is almost unbelievable. But it would be unfair to say that he’s a composer solely remembered for the Adagietto, since he introduced such forms to music which, though not likeable to all, set the path for its history deep into the twentieth century. It’s hard to know whether there would have been Stravinsky were it not for Mahler.
Another point to consider is that suffering and feelings of one’s private life, whether or not they boost a composer’s artistic work, have never been enough to prevent them from continuing. The death of Stravinsky’s daughter Ludmilla, also of his wife Ekaterina, and close to that time his mother, occurred within the space of approximately one and a half years. To our knowledge neither propelled him to write music nor stopped him point blank from composing. He wrote the first two movements of his Symphony in C before or in the period of these deaths and the second two after them. But judging by the composition of the symphony, can we tell a marked difference in its character midway through? Stravinsky himself denied that there was any link between the outcome of the symphony and his personal life. It may not necessarily be true – but let us ask ourselves, why should it have been?
In the non-musical field, Pushkin was writing verses aged four. Tolstoy wrote a huge novel called Anna Karenina which is said to have been inspired by an account he read in a newspaper of a woman who threw herself onto the rails. Evidently this was nothing to do with his life. Wagner focussed his life on the creation of the ‘music drama’, and was constantly exploiting the concept of ‘redemption through love’. Could one really associate this to his private life? While there are some who make connections between his love for Mathilde Wesendonck and the Liebestod from Tristan and Isolde, it has to be said that the Liebestod deserves more credit. It’s an aria (not an instrumental piece as frequently believed), at the end of an opera of much poorer musical quality. But it’s divine. It would even be a little base to suppose that a mere woman like Wesendonck – completely disregarding her beauty or intelligence, however much there was of it – would have been the trigger for that mark of genius. This is the product of divinity.
Puccini wrote that he had wept uncontrollably at writing Mimì’s death in La Bohème. But what could this have to do with his own life? It was said to have been subtly based on a book called Scènes de la vie Bohème by Henry Murger. Another ironic fact about Puccini is that Madama Butterfly was not only inspired by a Japanese play which had nothing to do with his own experiences, but was the foreshadowing of something dark that was to happen to him afterwards. After the opera had been written Puccini’s maid was accused of having an affair with him, and, plunged into despair, she killed herself from fear that she had lost her honour in the public eye, a way similarly to Butterfly. The only work by Puccini which could possibly reflect his own experiences could be Il Tabarro of Il Trittico, written at the beginning of the First World War and sounding as gloomy as the streets of World War I Italy. The main character of it sings: ‘I’m a city girl and only the Paris air keeps me alive,’ at the exact period when Puccini himself was stifled because of limitations of travel and freedom. If this, however, can be called the opera where Puccini reveals himself, it also has to be called possibly the least successful of his operas, with the exception of La Fanciula del West. Neither have much for which we can credit them.
If opera singers were to base their performances on personal suffering they would never be able to sustain a role. How many prima donnas have suffered from tuberculosis? How many have been prepared to die for love? The general public would probably predict not many. Opera is an almost exaggerated art where the kind of suffering that characters endure onstage hardly exists in real life, or, if it does, it exists in a past or in a far away distance that is unfamiliar to our eyes. Singing these roles requires an immense love and unmoveable devotion to the music. Envisaging that one is dying gradually, and especially that one is dying so slowly that they have the time to make a full-blown confession or sing the same phrase eighteen times, it a difficult feat for the normal, well-to-do opera singer. But it’s possible.
Those who have the tendency to assume that Maria Callas was ‘great’ because of her emotional, ‘turbulent’ – or however critics choose to put it – life, would be very wrong to assume that her greatness came from the fabric of her life at all. Aged thirty-one, Callas was married to a man she did think she loved, the Italian industrialist Giovanni Battista Meneghini, twenty-eight years her senior. But he was a companion, and had never been a lover. He fell asleep most of the time and was categorically no source of her dramatic inspiration. This didn’t stop her from understanding the desperation of Cio-Cio San when she recorded Butterfly with Karajan that year. Nor does that mean that as soon as she began her liaison with Onassis she suddenly ‘knew’ what her heroines were singing about. She had known from the age of fourteen, when she sang her first Casta diva. If she grew more passionate in a role it came from her love of music – not her love elsewhere. An analysis of the chronology of her performances and studio recordings can confirm that.
So the musical genius, it can be said, does not suffer so much as we would expect. At least, they don’t suffer their private problems through their music. They suffer the creation of music and it gives them problems. Geniuses have enough on their minds as it is; serving huge, hating or adoring publics, trying to make the most of art in hard conditions, trying to feed their own prides as they do so and seeing that they please their maker – whoever that may be. Let’s not attribute the everyday worries of life to these demi-gods. Frankly, they’re better than us, and they’re better than that.
