11 Bed-Hopping Composers

Jeremy Pound lifts the covers off those notorious notesmiths who found the thrill of playing away simply too hard to resist

- Jeremy Pound

‘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…

1 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.

2 Gabriel Fauré