Read on to discover the composers and artists who used music to win back a lost love…
Heartbroken Luke Howard hit the headlines in late 2017 when he sat at a ‘Play Me, I’m Yours’ piano on Bristol’s College Green for hours on end. The aim? A desperate bid to win back his ex-girlfriend’s affections.
‘I’m a musician, I don’t now what else to do,’ Howard said soon before his solitary watch began.
The hopeless romantic vowed not to stop until his former paramour – known only as ‘Rapunzel’ – gave him a second chance. But his attempt ended in failure. She didn’t return, and he was punched in the head following a torrent of online abuse.
But he was by no means the first person to turn to music in a bid to win back a lost love…
Music to win back a lost love… Gustav Mahler
When Mahler learnt of his wife Alma’s liaisons with Walter Gropius (following the death of her daughter Maria Anna at the age of five), he was quick to react. Surely, he reckoned, dedicating his epic Eighth Symphony to her would remind her of their former wedded bliss?
Alas no, and by the time he began his Tenth Symphony in 1910, the feelings of desperation had, if anything, increased – his scrawled ‘To live for you! To die for you!’ and ‘Almschi!’ on the final page of the score tells its own sad tale.
Before his death in 1911, Gustav had even taken an interest in Alma’s composing – which he had demanded she abandon when they married. Under his guidance, Alma prepared five of her songs for publication, which were issued in 1910 by Gustav’s own publisher, Universal Edition.
Following a tumultuous affair with the artist Oskar Kokoschka between 1912 and 1914, Alma resumed contact with Gropius, and in August 1915, they married.
Music to win back a former lover… Hector Berlioz
Twenty years later, Berlioz found a similar lack of success when he wrote his orchestral work Lélio, this time directed at Marie Moke, who had broken off their engagement in favour of Camille Pleyel.
Camille Moke was just 18 when Berlioz first met her, and already one of the most brilliant pianists of her generation. Berlioz was eight years older, and reeling from a disastrous attraction to the Irish actress Harriet Smithson.
Camille fell quickly for the brooding, impressionable Berlioz but he did not immediately reciprocate. Camille persisted, though, and her ‘slim and graceful figure, magnificent black hair and large blue eyes’ (Berlioz’s description) could not forever be resisted. ‘I yielded,’ Berlioz wrote, ‘and let myself find consolation for all my sorrows in a new passion.’
From that point on, things moved with dizzying rapidity. The couple declared their intention to marry, rendering Camille’s mother furious. Berlioz was penniless, she objected. At the very least he must have an opera performed successfully before the marriage could happen.
Berlioz… a rival proposal
Worse was to follow, when an alternative proposal of marriage arrived at the Moke household from ‘someone with a large fortune’. In 1831, Mme Moke sent a letter to Berlioz: Camille, she wrote, would be marrying Camille Pleyel, heir to the prestigious piano manufacturing company and 30 years her senior.
An ill-conceived plan to shoot dead the faithless Camille Moke, her mother, Pleyel and then himself was thankfully abandoned. Instead, Berlioz poured his heartbreak into Lélio.
But here, there’s a twist. It was on hearing Lélio that Harriet Smithson, the beautiful actress who had previously inspired Berlioz’s lovelorn Symphonie fantastique, decided to get back in touch.
Soon after, she decided that the composer was, indeed, the man for her. They were married at the British Embassy in Paris on 3 October 1833.
Music to win back a lost love… Tony Blackburn
In 1976, British DJ Tony Blackburn fell to pieces when his wife Tessa Wyatt, star of hit sitcom Robin’s Nest, left him. The marriage had not been a happy one, marred by infidelity on both sides. Nonetheless, the news hit Blackburn hard.
‘I was distraught. Opening myself a bottle of wine, I swallowed several Valium and sat down to watch Fawlty Towers,’ he told the Evening Standard in 2012. ‘The idea was that I’d die laughing – though in truth I knew I hadn’t taken enough tablets to cause myself any lasting harm.’
Blackburn was soon back behind the mic, holding a press conference in which he tearfully announced ‘I still love her’, and playing Chicago’s ‘If You Leave Me Now’ over and over on his Radio 1 show.
‘I found it painful to listen to,’ he recalled, ‘and sometimes told my listeners why.’
Alas, the song was not enough to move Tessa, and the divorce was granted in November 1977.
Music to win back a former lover… Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Not a real love affair, perhaps, but Mozart‘s beautiful music at the end of his Marriage of Figaro was enough to reconcile fictional lovers.
The Count has spent much of Mozart’s opera attempting to bed the servant Susanna, who is engaged to Figaro – much to his wife, the Countess’s, distress. In the aria ‘Porgi, amor, qualche ristoro’ (Grant, love, some comfort) she pours out her heartbreak.
By the end of the opera, however, the Count is thoroughly chastened and sings, ‘Contessa perdono!’ (Countess, forgive me!) to win back his wife’s good favour. Amazingly, it works, and all is well.
Such is the power of music.