Read on to discover 11 notorious bed-hopping composers who just couldn't resist temptations of the flesh...
‘If music be the food of love, play on,’ wrote Shakespeare. It’s advice that, over the four centuries since, composers have followed to the letter, and often to excess. Take, for example, the young Sibelius who, on becoming engaged to Aino Järnefelt in 1890, felt the need to assure his family that, ‘You must not think that this engagement is like the previous ones.’ Given his track record involving a string of local beauties, each relationship as fleeting as the last, his relatives had every right to be sceptical.
As things turned out, he and Aino went on to spend 65 years of married life together. Not, however, that being married prevented other composers from continuing to survey and then play the field, and descriptions of composers who racked up notches on the bedpost with almost the same regularity as notes on the stave could, in fact, fill several pages. Here, though, we’ve restricted ourselves to 11 of the more interesting examples…
Bed-hopping composers... Franz Liszt
Liszt was not short of admirers, and he knew it. Tall, dark and handsome, at his recitals he would turn his piano sideways to the audience so that his fans could get a better look at him in profile, and reports tell of female admirers being so smitten that they would even collect his cigar butts and grounds from his coffee cup as keepsakes.
And his list of lovers was as long as those famous fingers of his. Alongside his two long-term relationships – with the writers Marie d’Agoult and Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein – there were also flings with various pianists, singers, courtesans and others. Was he also intimate with the pianist Olga Janina? In 1871, Janina turned up at his doorstep with a revolver, threatening to shoot him and poison herself, and would later hint at a steamy relationship in a series of novels. By this stage, however, Liszt had taken holy orders, his sights turned firmly elsewhere.
Gabriel Fauré
Winnaretta Singer, socialite, patron and heiress to the Singer sewing machine fortune, fondly remembered Fauré for ‘his dark complexion, wavy steel grey hair and wonderful deepset eyes’. Those same deepset eyes also regularly roved.
Though history unkindly describes Fauré’s wife Marie as a surly, difficult type, she must have had her patience tested to the limit by a husband whose array of lovers included the composer Adela Maddison and pianist Marguerite Hasselmans – respectively 17 and 31 years his junior – and the soprano Emma Bardac, also 17 years younger than him. When, from 1893-6, Fauré composed his Dolly Suite for piano as a series of presents for Bardac’s daughter Régina-Hélène, it was whispered that he, and not Emma’s husband Sigismond, was the father. The timing of their relationship, though, makes this unlikely.
Bed-hopping composers... Claude Debussy
In 1908, the same Emma Bardac would become the second wife of Debussy, the final chapter in a saga that revealed the Frenchman at his most caddish. Four years earlier, the pair – he still married to Lilly Texier, she to Sigismond – had secretly sloped off to Jersey to enjoy the delights of each other’s company, after which Debussy decided to write to Lilly to call it a day.
When Lilly responded by attempting suicide, he ducked the issue by fleeing with Emma to England, leaving Lilly to pay the hospital bills. Parisian society was duly scandalised. Debussy’s marriage to Lilly, incidentally, had itself come after a relationship with a tailor’s daughter called Gabrielle Dupont… during which he’d appalled friends by announcing his engagement to singer Thérèse Roger, with whom he’d been having, yes, an affair.
Alma Mahler
Gustav Mahler really didn’t help himself. ‘The role of composer, the worker’s role, falls to me,’ he opined in a letter to his soon-to-be-wife Alma in 1901; ‘yours is that of a loving companion and understanding partner…’ Given Alma’s own considerable talents as a composer – and that Gustav also suggested that if she wasn’t so pretty, men wouldn’t notice her intellect – this did not go down well.
y 1910, she was having an affair with the architect Walter Gropius, whom she would later marry. That marriage, too, would be driven onto the rocks by her affair with novelist and poet Franz Werfel, the last in a string of relationships with high-profile cultural figures that included the artists Gustav Klimt and Oskar Kokoschka, and the composer Alexander Zemlinsky.
Bed-hopping composers... Enrique Granados
Over 24 years of marriage, Granados and his wife Amparo had no fewer than six children. This, however, did not prevent him from getting intimate with female piano students at his own Granados Academy. Chief among these was one Clotilde Godó Pelegrí who, having joined the Academy at 17, rapidly progressed from student to lover and muse, and it was at Clotilde’s house that the Spanish composer worked on much of his Goyescas for solo piano.
Despite this, Amparo remained loyal and, in turn, Granados himself would show the ultimate act of loyalty to her. When, during World War I, the ship they were travelling in was hit by a German submarine, he dived from a life raft to save her. Both perished in the sea.
Arnold Bax
For Arnold Bax, World War I proved a considerably more enjoyable affair. While others were serving king and country, the British composer – married, with two young children – was filling his days heading into the Hertfordshire countryside for secret liaisons with the pianist Harriet Cohen, 12 years his junior.
One such meeting is depicted in Bax’s 1917 symphonic poem November Woods, in which we hear a couple meeting up, getting caught in a storm and then heading for a cosy inn, with rooms. You can work out the rest for yourself…
Bed-hopping composers... Frederick Delius
‘He’d go off to Paris and sometimes he’d stay away for days. I just had to stand by while he enjoyed himself with other women.’ Though these words, spoken by Delius’s wife Jelka to his amanuensis Eric Fenby, come from the 1968 film Song of Summer, one expects they are not a million miles from the truth.
Whether in the sunny orange groves of Florida in his twenties – where he fathered a child that he later tried but failed to track down – or in the bright lights of the French capital, both before and after meeting Jelka, the English composer was a notorious womaniser. Alas, it was probably on one of those Parisian excursions that he contracted the syphilis that would both prevent him from starting a family with Jelka and, eventually, blind and kill him.
Leonard Bernstein
Leonard Bernstein’s wife, the actress Felicia Montealegre, would have been familiar with Jelka Delius’s world. As Bernstein’s biographer Humphrey Burton put it: ‘[Montealegre] would learn the hard way, through his absence, about his peripatetic lifestyle, with its pattern of incessant travel and hotel meals, new orchestras to conquer and other relationships to pursue.’
Those ‘other relationships’, largely with men, included radio station music director Tom Cothran, for whom Bernstein briefly left Montealegre. When, however, she was diagnosed with cancer, he returned to her, and was devastated by her death in 1978.
Bed-hoping composers... Jan Ladislav Dussek
At his peak in the late-1700s, Dussek liked to spread the love far and wide – literally. Forging a career across Europe, the bouncing Czech wowed big hitters including Catherine the Great and Marie-Antoinette while also wreaking havoc with his amorous affairs. In Lithuania, he wooed the wife of Prince Antoni Radziwiłł, who was almost persuaded to elope with him before deciding against it at the last moment.
Moving on to France, he set his sights on the harpist wife of the composer Jean-Baptiste Krumpholz, who was so devastated by the affair that he drowned himself in the River Seine. And then in England, he did finally settle down and marry… but when financial problems necessitated another move, he hopped back to the continent, abandoning his wife forever on the other side of the Channel.
Giacomo Puccini
Sopranos were very much Puccini’s thing. Star performers Maria Jeritza, Emmy Destinn, Cesira Ferrani and Hariclea Darclée are all among those understood to have had dalliances with the great opera composer, so little surprise that his wife Elvira became increasingly suspicious of anyone with whom he came into contact – she had already withstood his affair with a schoolteacher called Corinna early in their marriage.
But in one notorious incident, those suspicions were misdirected and would have tragic consequences. Believing that her husband’s latest fling involved Doria, one of their maids, she openly accused her and then sacked her, at which point the devastated Doria took her own life. The post mortem, though, proved that she died a virgin. Puccini had, in fact, been having an affair with Doria’s cousin, Giulia.
Bed-hopping composers... Pauline Viardot
Finally, there’s the mysterious love life of Pauline Viardot. Married at 18 to a theatre director 21 years her senior, the composer and mezzo – who was also an outstanding pianist – proved an object of infatuation wherever she went. Did she have an affair with fellow composer Charles Gounod? His adoring letters hint at it, but that’s about as much as we know.
More intriguing is her relationship with the Russian playwright Ivan Turgenev who, having followed her operatic career with an almost obsessive zeal, went onto buy land next to the Viardots in Baden-Baden and then actually move in with them in their house in Paris. Turgenev’s later intimations that he was the father of at least one of Pauline’s children suggest he was a lot more than just a lodger…
