Nicolas Dufetel wrote not long ago that the relationship between Liszt and Wagner, so often discussed, has yet fully to be understood. (1) The same is true, I would claim, of the relationship that began precisely ten years earlier between Liszt and Berlioz, which is the subject of this brief communication. Considering the warm friendship that burgeoned between the two artists on the eve of the first performance of the Symphonie fantastique, and considering the intense affairs of the heart that then preoccupied them both, it is not surprising that these young men should almost immediately speak openly of their private lives. Nonetheless, as points of honor, honorable men keep to themselves the intimate aspects of the person of the woman they love. This would pertain even to those who enjoyed the company of courtesans, in whose worlds privacy was otherwise rare. Indeed, men could be not ashamed but proud of their associations with courtesans: women who might be externally glamorous, if internally unhappy, and who might be intelligent, if not formally schooled--except in the ways of love, of course, which made them excellent teachers of the young. Liszt himself spoke openly of his relationship with Marie Duplessis, for example, the model for La Dame aux camelias, the object of the pianist's attentions in 1847, and the first woman he truly loved, he tells us, who had passed away. (2)
If, in the obviously less dramatic world of sincere and monogamous love, marital or other, a man's devotion to his lady did indeed incorporate protection of her intimacy, then I think it is reasonable, in historical as well as contemporary terms, to find peculiar if not patently offensive the letter that Berlioz sent to Liszt in the immediate aftermath of his marriage to Harriet Smithson, in which he announced to his younger friend that his wife had been a virgin, "tout ce qu'il y a de plus vierge." (3) This is offensive because it draws attention to defloration, in this case...
12 year old girl defloration
Download Zip: https://celpesxlauyo.blogspot.com/?ca=2vEVIG
2ff7e9595c
Comments