A wife as nothing more than helpmate, comfort, cushioner: how long ago did that go out of fashion? Probably more recently in the world at large than it did in the sphere of the arts – composers, artists, writers generally moved in more liberated, more Bohemian circles than their contemporaries in the standard professions. But what were the stories of the wives of the great composers? While some enjoyed careers in their own right, others were forced to suppress their wishes to support their husbands…
Of the great composers’ wives, there are a few which already familiar household names, but many others have been left as footnotes in the lives of their famous husbands. Some enjoyed careers as composers, performers or artists, but were still often left playing second fiddle to the compositional output of their husbands. In nearly all instances, however, the wives of the great composers played integral roles in supporting and facilitating their husbands’ work, so their impact can be felt in much of the music we know and love.
Clara Schumann was a pianist of astonishing skill and sensitivity, all reports attest, a muse not only to Robert but also, extending after his death, to their friend-in-common Johannes Brahms. Carl Nielsen’s Anne Marie enjoyed as high a reputation in the field of sculpture as he did in music, at least during their lifetimes. Yet there were still limits we wouldn’t think acceptable today: ‘There isn’t room for two artists in this relationship’; ‘My career comes first’.
The women forced to sacrifice their careers for their composer husbands
No doubt it happens, but the woman will often think twice at such an ultimatum, or else make a decision to make the greater of the pair her life project to support and follow of her own free will (the same is true of gay marriages and relationships). A recipe for unhappiness in the first case was true for Alma Mahler; by all accounts, Pauline Strauss (Richard Strauss‘s wife) herself made the decision to give up a strong career as a fine soprano.
Yet even Pauline still suffers from the male perspective, as is clear in Strauss’s autobiographical marriage-opera Intermezzo.
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Composers' wives: seven great stories
1. Constanze Mozart: resourceful, spirited... so much more than a muse
In 1781, Mozart announced to his father that he wanted to marry one of the three ‘Weber women’. He wasn't interested in the eldest, Josepha, who had driven him to distraction, but ‘the Martyr of the family’, Constanze. He went on to name his heroine Constanze in his opera, Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio), composed the following year.
The letter of 15 December 1781 is typically perceptive and sensitive, one of many contradicting the image of the scatological numpty projected in Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus. Wolfgang tells Leopold that while he has the same sexual drive as any young man, he has been too religious and decent ‘to seduce an innocent girl’ and too concerned for his health ‘to play around with whores’.
‘As my personal disposition is more inclined to a quiet and domestic life than towards noise and excitement… In my eyes, an unmarried man lives only half a life’. Constanze is ‘the most kindhearted, the most skilled’ of the sisters, he goes on, with ‘no great wit but enough common sense to fulfil her duties as a wife and mother’ and ‘two little black eyes and a graceful figure’ which are ‘her whole beauty… I love her and she loves me with all her heart.’
As in most marital relationships of the 18th and 19th centuries, we’d like to hear more from the woman’s side, of course. But there is enough evidence to prove that Constanze was a resourceful and spirited individual, who cared for her husband’s legacy long after his death. The wedding took place on 4 August 1782 in Vienna’s Stefansdom.
I’d always wondered why the (semi) comic opera of that year and the most sublime of all the wind serenades were the first of Mozart’s works to have that at-one-with-the-world aura we know so well from the mature masterpieces, a radiance only very fitfully to be found in the riven genius of his first great opera Idomeneo. Last year’s discovery reinforced a hunch: Constanze’s role as muse as well as wife had a more profound effect on the music than we can ever realise.
2. Pauline Strauss: fury, coquettishness... and generosity of spirit
In the case of Pauline Strauss, née de Ahna, a major-general’s daughter just like Alice Elgar (the wife of 19th-century British composeer Edward Elgar), we know exactly the effect on the music. Richard Strauss created a series of musical portraits, filtered through a satirical or mock-epic imagination. There’s the woman of infinite variety portrayed in the most complex and difficult violin solo ever written for an orchestral leader in the symphonic tone poem Ein Heldenleben (A Hero’s Life); Strauss himself is the hero, but only in part and very much with tongue in cheek.
The Wife has a variety of themes in the 24 hours of Strauss family life so exuberantly portrayed in the Symphonia Domestica. As a soprano of formidable talent, strong enough to sing Isolde and Freihild, the heroine of Strauss’s first opera, under Strauss’s baton at Weimar, and Elisabeth in Tannhäuser as well as a Parsifal flower-maiden at Bayreuth, Pauline’s amazing breath control was the reason why songs like ‘Traum durch die Dämmerung’ and ‘Freundliche Vision’ are especially taxing to singers of shorter wind.
Even after Pauline’s apparently voluntary retirement from the operatic stage and the concert platform to bring up the Strausses’ only child, Franz, her legacy lived on in songs right through to the incredibly long phrases of the Four Last Songs of 1948-9. Eduard Hanslick, Wagner’s notorious opponent immortalised as Beckmesser in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, called Pauline the composer’s ‘better and more beautiful other half’.
The phrase went straight into the libretto Strauss concocted himself for Intermezzo, fleshing out at length an anecdote of a rather serious marital misunderstanding. Christine Storch, the leading role, is very decidedly Pauline Strauss in all her pettishness, fury, coquettishness and generosity of spirit (unfortunately in that order, though Strauss lavishes his finest music on the generosity in one of his greatest slow movements, the orchestral interlude as Christine dreams by the fireside). In forging an identity for multifarious Christine, Strauss throws in just about every detail concerning her follies and virtues except the most crucial: that she has been a performer of great distinction, and has given it all up for family life.
Wouldn’t a thwarted artistic temperament be a much more plausible explanation for the dissatisfaction, the artfully staged paddies, the ineffectual attempts Christine makes to put herself at the centre of everything? It’s typical that the only other views we get on her, apart from those of the maid who has to button her lips, come from men. Even the one who’s on her side thinks she’s ‘just what he needs’.
But did Pauline Strauss have any agency in her marriage?
But what about her needs? At least there’s half an act in which we see Christine apart from her husband, but only in a questionable friendship with a younger man which will serve to put her in the wrong. That raises another unanswered question: did the relationship with the ‘Baron’ have its counterpart in real life, as we know the telegram sent in error by a girl on the make to Strauss certainly did?
3. Alma and Gustav Mahler: the 'competitive relationship' between two composers
We have to take Strauss’s word for it that he never forced his dissatisfied wife into anything; whereas we know for certain that the marriage between Alma Schindler and Gustav Mahler, the colleague with whom Strauss had a difficult but not unfruitful professional friendship, got off to a bad start by any standards.
What we know of Alma’s songs shows a more than modest talent. There’s no question of her rising to the level of her husband’s symphonies – who else could, at that time? But to her liberal family in 1890s Vienna almost as much as to us now, the unbelievably egotistical ultimatum that there couldn’t be room for two composers in a marriage seemed intolerable. It’s encapsulated in Mahler’s letter of 19 December 1901, of which this is merely a sample:
‘Have you any idea how ridiculous, and in time, how degrading for both of us such a peculiarly competitive relationship would inevitably become? What will happen if, just when you’re “in the mood”, you’re obliged to attend to the house or that something I might happen to need, since, as you wrote, you ought to relieve me of the menial details of life… You… have only one profession from now on: to make me happy.’
An extreme statement, surely, of what was sometimes taken as a given in marital relations between creative artists and women who served.
At any rate, Alma questioned the one who was really being ridiculous. She wrote in her diary for 22 December, ‘But must one of us be subordinate? Isn’t it possible with the help of love to merge two fundamentally opposing points of view into one?’. But she went ahead regardless. 11 years later, just before Mahler died, it turned out not to be enough. Though Alma did not leave her husband long for the architect Walter Gropius, would her new volte-face hold? At any rate, she married ‘the other’ after Mahler’s death.
4. Susana Walton and the forced abortion
Still, it could have been worse. On their honeymoon, William Walton told his vivacious Argentinian wife Susana that there was only room for one child in the relationship. When she did accidentally fall pregnant, he essentially drove her to a back-street abortion. Was Susana’s subsequent insanely energetic promotion of William as his widow later in life over-compensation for all that frustrated drive?
5. Alice Elgar: the support system who was neglected in the composer's music
Let’s take an intermezzo of our own now between the high-profile wives. By comparison with Pauline and Alma, Caroline Alice Roberts (later Alice Elgar) remains a more shadowy figure. Like Pauline, she was a major-general’s daughter who took music lessons from a merely promising composer. She was also 40, nine years older than Elgar, when they married. Was this the helpmate pure and simple, albeit one who took her domestic powers seriously to impress upon her husband the need of moving in higher society as well as to make him work and to divert his thoughts of suicide during bouts of depression?
Creatively, this good wife was shunted sideways in Elgar’s most autobiographical music, as Pauline never was in Strauss’s. It probably says much for the Edwardian supremacy of the male that ‘C.A.E.’ is the first, delicate but melancholy portrait of the Enigma Variations while its heart and soul is AJ Jaeger, ‘Nimrod’, the tubercular employee at Novello’s music publisher to whom Elgar confided so many of his innermost thoughts as well as his artistic ones.
Maybe that has more to do with the summer night’s discussion between Jaeger and Elgar discussing Beethoven’s slow movements, and particularly the one at the centre of the ‘Pathétique’ Sonata which the ‘Nimrod’ variation so nobly emulates. But even in the finale, ‘Nimrod’ plays a bigger role alongside ‘E.D.U.’ than the briefly returning ‘C.A.E’.
In the quotation-rich The Music Makers, moreover, Elgar evokes the dying fall of the Second Symphony composed, he wrote, as a tribute to his (homosexual) driving companion Frank Schuster, at the lines about a friend who ‘wrought flame in another man’s heart’. Women were muses, but attachments to one’s own sex, even if they were merely romantic as was common at the time, evoked something stronger.
6. Aino Sibelius: suppressed her own wishes to support her husband through money woes and alcoholism
Mothering seems also to have played a large part in the stressful married life of Sibelius’s wife Aino. Like Alma, she came from a highly cultured family, albeit also that of an army man like Pauline’s and Alice’s. One brother, Arno Järnefelt, was a writer, another, Eero, a painter. The 1890s and early 1900s were hard years; it was left to Aino to deal with her husband’s carousing and financial difficulties, and she turned to the solace of creating a garden in their humble home known as Ainola at Järvenpää, not far from Helsinki.
In 1907 Sibelius had an operation on for what turned out to be a malign throat tumour, and touched no alcohol or cigars for the next seven years – happy ones for Aino. The threat of separation or divorce loomed again when that time of abstinence came to an end. Yet this was a 65-year-old marriage, probably one of more happiness than grief.
Aino lived on at Ainola until her death in 1969. She wrote in later years that though she had had to repress and control her own wishes, ‘I bless my destiny and see it as a gift from heaven. To me my husband’s music is the word of God – its source is noble, and it is wonderful to live close to such a source.’
7. Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen: the award-winning sculptor landed with an unfaithful husband
Anne Marie Brodersen was an award-winning sculptor in Paris when Carl Nielsen arrived in that mecca for Scandinavian artists. A whirlwind romance and a pack-it-in European tour culminated in a Roman wedding. They shared liberal values which meant there was never any question but that Anne Marie should continue her career as well as raising three children.
She was a fine sculptor. Anne Marie took on big projects – the bronze doors, a colossal equestrian statue of Christian IX – work and preliminary studies on which did indeed make her husband feel neglected.
The real fault, though, was his. Regular liaisons led to an illegitimate child and the revelation that he’d been carrying on with his children’s governess. A hushed-up separation lasted from 1915 to 1922, when Anne Marie returned to comfort the last years of the composer’s life, constantly troubled by a heart condition which led to his death at 66.
If the Nielsens’ was a rather more troubled portrait of a marriage than the Strausses’ or the Mozarts’, it anticipates the modern pattern of parallel careers and forgiveness of infidelities in a world where constant travel makes a fulfilled creative life for both partners difficult but not impossible.
Main image: Richard Strauss with his wife and son © Getty Images