The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2Hughes, Rupert
History
The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2
Hughes, Rupert
Composers -- Biography
Orlando di Lasso, "one of the morning stars of modern times," whose
music was so beautiful that once at Munich a thunder-storm was
miraculously hushed at the first note of one of his motets, lived a
love-life much like Schumann's, save that he seems to have had no
hard-hearted parents to strengthen and purify his resolve. The only
court he went to, to win her, was the court at Munich, where his Regina
was a maid of honour. She bore him six children, and they lived
ideally, it seems. But his health gave way now and then before his hard
work, and finally, when he had reached his threescore and ten, his wife
came home to find him gone mad, and unable even to recognise her, who
had been at his side for thirty years. She guarded him tenderly, and
strove hard to cheer his last days, but melancholy surrendered him only
to death.
Adrien Willaert had a wife, and loved her long and well, and wrote many
wills, in which he grew more and more affectionate toward his helpmeet,
yet strangely he never mentioned his daughter, who was herself a
composer, and had perhaps a romance of her own, down there in Juliet's
country where her Flemish father took her.
How otherwise is the domestic life of Jacques de Wert, whose wife
conspired against him heinously, and put his very life in danger! When
he was well rid of this baggage, he fell into an intrigue with a lady
of the court of Ferrara. Her name was Tarquinia Molza, and she was a
poetess, but her relatives frowned upon the alliance of her poetry and
his music, and forced her to go back to her mother at Mantua, where she
outlived De Wert some twenty-seven years.
His is such a life as one would take to prove the unsettling effects of
music; yet what shall we say then of Josse Boutmy, who lived
ninety-nine years and raised twelve children, spending the greater part
of his life with his faithful spouse in one long struggle against
poverty, one eternal drudgery for the pence necessary to educate his
family? Shall we not say that he was as truly influenced by music as
Jacques de Wert?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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