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| ISBN-13: | 9780720616804 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Owen, Peter Limited |
| Publication date: | 08/01/1998 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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Recollections of the Young Proust
A Memoir of the Friendship Between Marcel Proust, Reynaldo Hahn and Marie Nordlinger
By P. F. Prestwich
Peter Owen Publishers
Copyright © 1999 P.F. PrestwichAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7206-1682-8
CHAPTER 1
A Youthful Prodigy
In the final pages of In Search of Lost Time, when his narrator was just beginning to write the novel we have been reading, Proust described the construction of his work as like that of an architect building a great cathedral, or, at a different level of craftsmanship, he compared it with the specially tasty dish, spiced beef with carrots and aspic, prepared by his old cook from many carefully chosen ingredients. Of all the themes which Proust used in the orchestration of his novel, as Wagner used the various leitmotifs in his operas, one of the most obvious is music.
Proust's close friendship with a professional musician affected the way in which he wrote about and listened to music – although he always said he had no technical knowledge, he could play the piano, compose a ditty and read a score. When he met Reynaldo Hahn for the first time at the end of May 1894, Reynaldo was nineteen, still a student at the Conservatoire, hoping for a production of his first opera. They both had a great love of books, a sense of humour and a keen interest in the social scene – the Paris salons where music was taken seriously were as important to Reynaldo's career as the radio, television and recording studios are to the young artists of today.
The Hahn family background was rather different from that of Proust. Marcel's paternal grandfather was a shopkeeper in a small provincial town not far from Chartres; his father, an only son, became a highly respected doctor and diplomat, an expert on cholera, professor at the university of Paris and widely travelled. Dr Proust married Jeanne Weil, the only daughter of a prosperous Jewish stockbroker. Both Reynaldo and Marcel were brought up as Roman Catholics though neither was a church-goer. Reuban Hahn, Reynaldo's paternal grandfather, was one of the first Jews in Hamburg to secede from the synagogue; he was the eldest of a large family, and he and his wife, Caroline Delavie from Paris, had ten children. Their eldest son, Carlos Hahn, left Germany at the age of twenty-two in 1845 to seek his fortune in Venezuela, where his business affairs prospered. In partnership with a friend, Guzman Blanco, he introduced railways, gas lighting, the telegraph and other innovations to the country, and when Señor Blanco became President of the Venezuelan Republic, Carlos Hahn was his financial adviser. Her married a beautiful and talented Spanish girl, becoming a Roman Catholic in order to do so – Elena de Echenagucia's father was Spanish, her mother partly Dutch, partly English (her maiden name was Ellis); she shared her husband's love of music, the theatre and botany. The family had a large town house and a villa in the country with a superb garden. Reynaldo, born on 9 August 1874, was the youngest of five sons and five daughters.
When the government in Caracas changed, Carlos Hahn decided in 1877 to return with his family to Europe and find treatment for his failing eyesight. He had relations and well-connected friends in Paris where they found a large, hospitable home at 5, rue de Cirque near the Elysée Palace. A daughter of Guzman Blanco's was married to the son of the Duc de Morny, illegitimate half-brother of the Emperor Napoleon III; another family friend was Comtesse Mélanie de Pourtalès who had been a lady-in-waiting to the Empress Eugénie. Princess Mathilde, niece of Napoleon I, was also a family friend.Reynaldo made his first public appearance at the piano in her drawing room when he was six, and at an even earlier age had sung popular songs to her on the beach at Trouville. He began lessons in composition with an Italian lady teacher when he was eight.
Carlos Hahn was a keen theatre- and concert-goer and had many friends among artists and actors. Federico de Madrazo, known as Coco, was Reynaldo's close friend from childhood; he was the son of the painter Raimondo de Madrazo, and nephew of the Director of the Prado. When Carlos Hahn went to the theatre he had a habit of reserving two stalls, for himself and his hat and coat, because he disliked queuing at the cloakroom. One evening he decided to take his small son with him, and this became a regular practice. A chance meeting with the actor Coquelin aîné led to an introduction to Massenet and a place for Reynaldo at the Conservatoire to study piano and harmony. He began there in 1885, knowing nothing, as he said, but eager to learn, and was horrified to discover that he was expected to practise the piano for three or four hours a day. An avid reader, he made these hours bearable by propping his book, a novel by Dumas père or Jules Verne, on the music stand while he rehearsed his scales. His favourite author, Alphonse Daudet, was kept for later reading on the hearth rug. He played the piano well, but he enjoyed composition even more. When he joined Massenet's composition class he found an inspiring teacher. Massenet, a man of great energy and charm, was the most popular professor on the staff. In his journal, and later when he became a music critic, Reynaldo often referred to Massenet's excellent teaching, his original ideas for the production of opera, his lectures on eighteenth-century composers; he became 'le Maître', adviser and friend, who did everything he could to promote his favourite pupil. A photograph of Massenet dated 1890 is inscribed, 'To my dear pupil, Reynaldo Hahn, in whom I believe'.
Reynaldo loved to write small-scale vocal works, mélodies, a genre he thought little appreciated in France, unlike Germany where, as he told his sister Maria, 'Das Lied sends the public into raptures.' He was fifteen when his first two songs were published by Heugel. 'Rêverie' was a setting of a poem by Victor Hugo, and the ever-popular 'Si mes vers avaient des ailes', also by Hugo, was dedicated to Maria – both songs were written the previous year, before his fourteenth birthday. He was soon in demand to play and sing his compositions, at first for family and friends in Paris and Hamburg, then in wider social circles in the drawing-rooms of London, Rome and Venice.
In the middle years of the nineteenth century the Opéra and the Opéra-Comique were dominated by Rossini, Meyerbeer and Halévy, while Offenbach ruled the boulevards. The only way for an ambitious young composer to earn a living was to write for the theatre. The teaching at the Conservatoire reflected this tendency in its emphasis on orchestration and dramatic cantatas. It was Edouard Risler, Reynaldo's best friend in the piano class, who was indirectly responsible for starting him on a theatrical career. At Risler's home, where he was a frequent visitor, he met a cousin of Alphonse Daudet, an artist, Louis Montégut, who recommended him to the novelist and playwright as a rising young composer. Reynaldo was thrilled to meet his favourite author, and they took to each other at once. He was asked to write two short pieces for Daudet's new play, L'Obstacle, which was performed at the Gymnase Theatre in December 1890.
The sixteen-year-old composer attended rehearsals with the author and soon became a friend of the family in the rue de Bellechasse, playing the piano to Daudet who was ill and often in great pain. On Thursday evenings it was open house – not a salon, Reynaldo explained to Maria, but a meeting place for everyone who was interested in politics and the arts. Here he met many well-known writers – Emile Zola and his wife ('an excellent woman, but frightening'); Edmond de Goncourt, who did not care for music and usually left the room when the piano was opened; Jules Lemaître; and especially Stéphane Mallarmé, the leading Symbolist poet.
Maria, his only unmarried sister, nearly ten years older than Reynaldo, was his favourite correspondent. The many letters she kept are fluent and lively, showing an acute eye and ear for the social scene and a keen interest in everything to do with music and the theatre. From his father he inherited a love of theatre in all its forms, opera, drama, ballet, music hall, café concert, musical comedy or circus. During the summer of 1891 Maria Hahn spent some weeks in London with their cousin, Carl Meyer and his wife Adèle, to learn English and enjoy what Reynaldo called 'the ardent pleasures of the city of fogs!' On his annual visits to London, Reynaldo usually stayed with the Meyers at 35, Hill Street, Mayfair, or at their country home at Balcombe in Sussex, and they were frequent visitors to Dieppe and Paris. Like his uncle, Carlos Hahn, Carl Meyer was a dedicated theatre-goer. It was probably through the Meyers that Reynaldo became friendly with such patrons of the arts as Lady de Grey and Lady Sassoon.
In the examination for harmony at the Conservatoire at the end of June, Reynaldo came top out of twenty-eight in the class – greatly to his own surprise and even more that of his father. Massenet advised him to go and see his own publisher, Hartmann, for a subject to work on during the summer vacation; it was to be a three-act opera, with a libretto taken from a novel, Le Mariage de Loti, 'a Polynesian idyll, quite modern and charming', Reynaldo explained to his sister. The novel was written by a naval officer, Julien Viaud, who took from this early work his pseudonym, Pierre Loti. His books with their exotic settings were much in vogue at the time and Delibes had already based his opera Lakmé on themes from Loti.
In a letter to his sister (written in English) from Hamburg at the end of October, Reynaldo listed the operas he had heard at the Stadttheater. Lohengrin had just been revived in Paris and was badly received. 'As soon as I arrive to Paris, I will go to hear it. Tannhäuser is kolossal, as they say here ... as for Meistersinger, it is beautiful from beginning to end and always interesting.' But he had reservations about Wagner: genius he might be yet he could also be 'long-winded, boring, exaggerated and unnecessarily eccentric'. The following summer, 1892, he joined Risler in Bayreuth and heard Die Meistersinger again as well as Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal; these three operas, or parts of them, were always his favourites and he wrote many pages about them.
His mélodies were selling well; he had come to a satisfactory arrangement with the publisher Heugel: '100 francs now, and 200 francs after the sale of the first 500 for each song.' Before the advent of gramophone and radio, sales of sheet music were an important source of income for a composer – by 1914 Reynaldo's songs were sung in drawing-rooms all over Europe, boosted by his performances and popular lecture recitals. In 1891, probably at Daudet's suggestion, he set to music a poem by Verlaine, to which he gave the title 'Offrande', as the same poem had been set by Fauré and Debussy together with other lyrics by Verlaine. The title of his first collection of Verlaine poems, seven of them, was taken from another work by the poet, 'L'Art poétique': 'Rien de plus cher que la chanson grise, Où l'Indécis au Précis se joint.' Les Chansons grises launched him on a successful career as performer and composer.
In August 1893 Reynaldo celebrated his nineteenth birthday in London with the Meyers. He sent the third act of his opera to Risler (the title had been changed from L'Ile des rêves to L'Ile du rêve): 'Massenet sets great store on my Ile du rêve being staged. Funnily enough, I'm not so keen as he is ... One thing only interests and obsesses me and has all my enthusiasm, the reconciliation of literature and music.' By the end of the year the opera was finished, but he had to wait four years before it was produced. Writing to Coco de Madrazo shortly after its production in 1898, he remembered that when he was composing it he had been 'in a state of amorous exaltation such as I hope never to experience again. There are things in this score that I could never write again because they have a naïve tenderness, a youth, a poetry, that my spirit has lost.' The role of Mahénu, the heroine of the opera, was based on the voice and movements of Cléo de Mérode, a ballet dancer at the Opéra. They met during rehearsals for one of Massenet's operas when he was sixteen or seventeen and she two years older. He adored her grace and dark beauty and soon became a frequent visitor to the apartment where she lived with her mother; a lasting friendship grew up between them, all the more enduring for being chaste.
Both Reynaldo's parents were devoted admirers of Sarah Bernhardt and first took him to see her act when he was six or seven. He and his sister, Clarita, had been to see the great actress in one of her favourite roles, the courtesan Marguerite in La Dame aux camélias by Alexandre Dumas fils. At the end of January 1894 they went to see her again, this time in a new play by Armand Silvestre, Isëyl, set in India six centuries BC. She was, Reynaldo told Maria; 'astonishingly young in the first two acts, sublime in the last two ... it is clear that she is now completely mistress of her art.' Massenet's new opera Thaïs was produced in March at the Opéra, and at the end of the month Reynaldo went to Spain with Carl and Adèle Meyer, where he enjoyed speaking Spanish. On 22 May he was invited to a musical evening in the gar den studio of Mme Madeleine Lemaire to hear Léon Delafosse, who was a fellow-student at the Conservatoire, play his own settings of some poems by Count Robert de Montesquiou. Among the guests was the man who was to become his greatest friend.
CHAPTER 2Patrons and Friends
A portrait in oils of Marcel Proust, often reproduced, shows a well-groomed young man-about-town with an orchid in the lapel of his frock coat. It was painted by a family friend, Jacques-Emile Blanche, and exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1893 when Proust was twenty-one. This is Proust the socialite who, since the age of seventeen, had been a seasoned diner-out, welcomed by the mothers of his school friends at the Lycée Condorcet for his charming manners and lively conversation. There is another version of this portrait, a quick pencil sketch by the same artist done when they were both on holiday at Trouville in October 1891; in this study Proust's large, dark eyes stare through and beyond the spectator, absorbed, dispassionate – Proust the omnivorous reader, scholar, artist.
He was well aware that the portrait in oils was a flattering one and made fun of it in a draft for his early novel, Jean Santeuil. Jean's portrait was painted by a fashionable artist, La Gandara, but the sleek young dandy it depicted would certainly not have been recognized by his classmates at the lycée who thought of him as untidy, with uncombed hair and dark circles round his eyes due to worry, insomnia and ill health. In a letter to one of his friends, Marcel gave a frank description of himself: 'I must confess I don't like him much, with his perpetual over-enthusiasms, his fussy ways, his tremendous passions and his adjectives.' The ill health from which he suffered began with a frightening attack of asthma at the age of nine, and also hay fever, which meant he could no longer enjoy the countryside he loved so much and caused him to miss classes at school. In spite of this he did well, especially in his last year when he came first in philosophy, thanks to a much admired teacher, M. Darlu. Besides the usual school subjects he studied Latin, Greek, German, perhaps a little English as a second language, though he never learnt to speak it. His mother, whom he adored, encouraged him to read widely. Before he left Paris to do a voluntary year's service in the army as a private at Orléans, he spent evenings in the literary salon of Mme Arman de Caillavet, an erudite and rather domineering lady with whom Anatole France, the leading novelist of the day, had a close liaison and whose writing she actively encouraged. He became friendly with her son, Gaston, and greatly admired the latter's fiancée, Jeanne Pouquet.
His greatest admiration, however, was reserved for the mother of his school friend Jacques Bizet, son of the composer of Carmen. After Bizet's early death his widow married a wealthy Jewish lawyer, Emile Straus. Geneviève Straus was the daughter of Fromental Halévy, professor at the Conservatoire de Musique and composer of many operas, notably one which had been a popular success in 1835, La Juive (The Jewess). Marcel adored her elegance and caustic wit and soon became a favourite visitor to her salon in the Boulevard Haussmann. He sent her extravagant bouquets of chrysanthemums, then newly fashionable, and long letters – their correspondence began when he was still at school and continued for over thirty years when they were both invalids. He sent her copies of everything he wrote and discussed his work with her.
Another hostess who played an important part in Marcel's life was Mme Madeleine Lemaire, who lived with her daughter Suzette in a small house with a large studio in the garden, 31, rue Monceau, at the top of the Boulevard Malesherbes. She had been a pupil of a painter known as 'the French Tiepolo', an Englishman called Charles Chaplin who had taken French nationality. The Salon of French Artists was an exhibition held annually in Paris similar to the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy in London. After her successful début at the Salon of 1866, she was soon able to sell every picture she painted, many of them flower studies and portraits. In May and June after her paintings had been sent in to the Salon, she held musical evenings every Tuesday in her studio, attracting increasing numbers of socialites and celebrities. She had a flair for discovering promising young artists, and the evening's entertainment would be given by a composer playing a new work, a foreign artist, a well-known actor or actress, or a young unknown whom she would encourage and introduce to sponsors. She insisted always on complete silence during the performance.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Recollections of the Young Proust by P. F. Prestwich. Copyright © 1999 P.F. Prestwich. Excerpted by permission of Peter Owen Publishers.
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Table of Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations,Introduction,
1 A Youthful Prodigy,
2 Patrons and Friends,
3 Dieppe and Beg-Meil,
4 Pleasures and Days,
5 The Young English Cousin,
6 A Celebrated Affair,
7 Apprenticeships,
8 A Passion for Ruskin,
9 Venice,
10 Work in Progress,
11 The Art Nouveau,
12 Japanese Water Flowers,
13 A New Venture,
14 On Reading,
15 A Change of Direction,
16 Cabourg,
17 Notes and Drafts,
18 The Ways Decided,
19 A Lasting Friendship,
Postscript,
Bibliography,
Notes,
Index,
Plates,