Love, requited or otherwise, was a huge inspiration for many of our greatest composers. We take a look at some of the most inspiring romantic couples in classical music…
Ludwig van Beethoven & Countess Josephine von Brunsvik
Though Beethoven never married, he was desperately in love with Countess Josephine von Brunsvik for much of his life. They met in 1799 when Beethoven began working as Josephine’s piano tutor. Despite some affection on Josephine’s side, her family quickly married her off to the far more eligible (and much older) Joseph Count Deym.
It is thought that Josephine was the ‘Immortal Beloved’ to whom Beethoven refers in his famous letter, now held by the British Library, in which Beethoven feverishly writes of his longing for his ‘angel’. ‘An die Hoffnung’ (To Hope) was secretly dedicated to Josephine, and the piano work Andante favori is also thought to have inspired by his love for her.
Music's great romantic couples... Richard Wagner & Cosima Liszt
Cosima, daughter of the Hungarian composer and pianist Franz Liszt, first met Wagner while on honeymoon with her first husband, Hans von Bülow. It was while sharing conducting duties with von Bülow at a concert in Leipzig that Wagner was ‘utterly transported by the sight of Cosima'. Though they were both still married, they began a relationship, and Cosima gave birth to two daughters that Bülow accepted as his own. Bülow and Cosima finally divorced in 1870, and Cosima and Wagner were married later that year.
The most famous work Wagner wrote for his adored wife was the ‘Symphonic Birthday Greeting’ (later known as the Siegfried Idyll), which he composed for her birthday in 1870, only months after they were married. Cosima was Wagner’s artistic partner for the duration of their marriage and, after his death in 1883, maintained his legacy as director of the theatre at Bayreuth.
Music's great Romantic couples... Robert & Clara Schumann
For years Clara and Robert Schumann were prevented from getting married by Clara’s father Friedrich Wieck, who resolutely opposed the match. After a lengthy legal process, and much heartbreak on both sides, the couple finally wed in 1840. Robert gave Clara two wedding presents: a diary, in which they kept a record of their marriage in minute (and sometimes sordid) detail, and the song cycle Myrthen.
Clara dedicated her Romance variée to Schumann, though with a huge amount of deference to his opinion: 'I ask forgiveness for the enclosed,' she wrote to her future husband; 'your ingenious setting of this little musical thought will redeem the errors in mine.'
Johannes Brahms & Clara Schumann
Brahms introduced himself to the Schumanns in 1853, aged 20, and became a fast family friend. Brahms was deeply in love with Clara. In 1855, while Robert was in an asylum following a suicide attempt, Brahms wrote to her a passionate plea: 'I can do nothing but think of you… What have you done to me? Can’t you remove the spell you have cast over me?' After Robert’s death the couple almost married, but Brahms seems to have abandoned her.
Brahms’s love for Clara must have had an impact on his music, but the only work he actually dedicated to her was the Capriccio, Op. 76, No. 1. Despite its length (just under four minutes) the work is a turbulent battle of emotions, perhaps reflecting Brahms’s own feelings about his ill-fated love affair.
Music's great romantic couples... Hector Berlioz & Harriet Smithson
More than any other composer, Berlioz defined his life and works around his love affairs. In 1827, the composer attended a performance of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in which Harriet Smithson was playing Ophelia. It was love at first sight for the composer, who began writing Smithson a series of impassioned letters to which she did not reply. Shortly after this, Berlioz wrote to a friend: 'You don’t know what love is, whatever you may say. For you, it’s not that rage, that fury, that delirium which takes possession of all one’s faculties, which renders one capable of anything.'
Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique is a direct outpourings of these feelings of passionate rage and delirium. The ‘idée fixe’ that recurs throughout the work in various guises is a musical portrait of Smithson, who soothes and taunts the ‘artist’ character in equal measure. In 1833, he finally managed to meet Smithson in person, and despite not speaking the same language managed to persuade her to marry him. Their marriage was not a happy one, and they separated in 1841.
Benjamin Britten & Peter Pears
For some 35 years, Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears contrived an apparently perfect gay marriage before the concept was invented. Their fruitful musical partnership was in many ways a cover for their personal relationship - at times tempestuous, but always loving.
Britten began by accompanying Pears’s lyric tenor in recitals in the late 1930s. He started writing song cycles for him, and then operas: indeed, his tenor parts (most famously, that of Peter Grimes) were defined entirely by Pears.
Other major roles written by Britten for Pears included the title role in Albert Herring (1947) and of Captain Vere in Billy Budd (1951). He also created the role of Peter Quint in 1954's The Turn of the Screw for his partner and muse, as well as that of Gustav von Aschenbach in the late, great and bleak Death in Venice (1973).
The couple's most influential collaboration, though, has to be founding the adventurous and experimental Aldeburgh Festival, in the beautiful Suffolk coastal town that they had made their home, in 1948.
Music's great romantic couples... John Cage & Merce Cunningham
It was the composer John Cage who inspired Merce Cunningham, one of the great choreographers of the 20th century, to start his own company. Cage toured with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company as composer, accompanist and music director, and from 1945 on the two were partners as much in life and love as in their work.
The two Americans began collaborating in the 1940s, a solid artistic partnership that lasted until Cage's death in 1992. Cunningham and Cage used 'chance procedures', as set out in the I Ching (the Chinese book of changes), to generate material. Using this process, they discarded many artistic traditions of narrative and form, famously asserting that dance and its music should not be intentionally coordinated with one another.
The pair were very private about their personal relationship, especially in the early years when Cage was married to Xenia Kashevaroff, and even after Cage and Kashevaroff divorced. The two were all too aware of the homophobia still rife in New York artistic circles. Nevertheless, their's was a lifelong devotion, and following Cage's death, Cunningham continued to use the composer's music in his choreography.