The Faustian bargains of a vexatious litigant
iin yet another futile attempt to get my CDs in order. I serendipitously unearthed a disc I had been looking for in vain — Beecham's 1929 recording, in English, of Faust. Cleaned by the Dutton Laboratories, it nevertheless has the antique resonance of the early days of the BBC, which supplied chorus and orchestra. Faust is sung by the delightful (and charmingly Welsh) Heddle Nash, my mother's favourite tenor, and Margarita by the pure, clear voice of Miriam Licette, a Beecham favourite. The fun of the recording, however, is the pantomime demon king of Robert Easton, who gives Mephistopheles a glorious theatrical timbre so you can almost see the flickering footlights and smell his greasepaint whiskers. Beecham speaks at one point, to explain the ballet music, and his voice, too, is a mesmeric period sound.
I like this recording particularly because it recreates the mixture of tragic horror and unconscious farce which is the essence of this most famous of all operas (not much done in recent years but due for a spectacular revival, I hear). Charles Gounod was a tragicomic figure himself. Intensely religious, he once studied for the priesthood and was a fanatical devotee of Palestrina. hut he was also a romantic tnalgre lui, always falling for ravishing, strong-minded women who led him ludicrous dances and fought pitched battles with his flinty-eyed wife. He was a little man, prematurely old, with a magnificent white beard and masses of Lear-like hair under a velvet skullcap which covered his bald dome. His English pseudo-mistress (she never actually permitted him to make love to her, though she scrubbed him thoroughly in his bath every day) was the society soprano Georgina Weldon, who described him as, Round. His closed shaped beard round, not one hair longer than the other (bristles like box-hedge trimming), his short neck, his round stomach, his round shoulders, his round eyes with which he glared at me!'
Gounod's father was a painter, his mother a concert pianist, and when he won the Prix de Rome he was still unsure whether he wanted to be an artist or a musician. He chose music, but he retained a strong visual appetite. One reason Faust became and remained such a popular success (it has been performed at the Paris Opera-Gamier twice as often as any other piece) is its succession of spectacular scenes. We think of it now as old-fashioned, but its presentation was, tech nically, far in advance of its time. It was first put on in 1859 at the Theatre Lyrique, Paris, which had just been rebuilt and equipped with the latest machinery. Dickens, who knew a lot about staging, saw it there in 1862 when he was in Paris to read Copper*Id at the British Embassy. He was overwhelmed, especially by the lighting effects: 'Admirable and really poetical effects of light — Mephistopheles surrounded by an infernal red atmosphere of his own. Margarita by a pale-blue mournful light — the two never blending. After she has taken the jewels placed in her way in the garden, a weird evening draws on, and the bloom fades from the flowers, and the leaves of the trees droop and lose their fresh green, and mournful shadows overhang her chamber window which was innocently bright and gay at first. I couldn't bear it, and gave in completely.' Tears were pouring down his face when he went backstage to congratulate the cast. Of course, illicit jewels had a particular significance to Dickens since it was his wife's discovery of his gift of a bracelet to Ellen Ternan which began his separation drama. And during his 1862 visit to France he secretly visited Ellen, though he would never have dared to take her openly to see Faust.
Georgina Weldon, though lacking Gounod's creative gifts — her songs, though worth performing, are not a patch on his melodies, which, at their best, are as good as Schubert's — has a much stronger character: a fierce feminist reformer in a man's world, and a bonny fighter on behalf of the weak. Unable to vote or stand for Parliament, she had recourse to the law and spent much of her life in the courts. When Gounod was finally won hack by his guileful wife. Georgina sued him for an immense list of goods and services she had rendered him during his highly lucrative sojourn in England (the Birmingham Choral Society paid him £4.000 an oratorio, for example). She was awarded £10,000 damages against him. She never collected, and the verdict was counterproductive in the sense that Gounod could never come to England again for her to pounce on him.
Still, success in the courts gave her a taste for law and she became what judges sometimes call a vexatious litigant. Her husband, a useless cavalry officer, found her too much for him and had her committed to a lunatic asylum — something which a husband, helped by unscrupulous lawyers and doctors, found shockingly easy to do in mid-Victorian times. She fought her way free, wrote a pamphlet, 'How I Escaped the Mad Doctors', and took the issue to court. The case became, in effect, a trial of the antiquated lunacy laws. Mr Justice Hawkins, summing up, expressed his dismay at what had happened to poor Georgina. The laws, he said, 'fill me with concern. Any friend or relative who chooses to think a person insane may sign an order to remove him to an asylum.' No oath was required. There was no responsible authority the so-called lunatic could appeal to. The judge said he hoped Parliament would change the laws, 'As they stand, they are calculated to fill everyone who thinks of them with terror and alarm.' She was awarded £1,000 damages, and an immense crowd of people cheered her as she left the court.
Having launched the reform of the lunacy laws, Georgina turned her attention to other causes: battered wives, orphaned children, abused animals — the weak, the dumb, the inarticulate. In her scores of cases, she normally represented herself, to the futy of some judges, the amusement and admiration of others, and the delight of the public. She won more than £20,000 in damages but found it hard to collect. She lost some of her actions. She had a spell in Newgate. An actress as well as a singer, she staged the trial scene from Pickwick, playing Sergeant Buzfuz herself. She held musical evenings at her house in which she appeared in her prison clothes. She figured in Punch and was caricatured by 'Spy' in Vanity Fair. She came a cropper when she rowed with a musical promoter called Riviere and accused him of bigamy. He was a scoundrel, but the specific accusation was false. The jury adored her, as did most people. They had to find on the facts but added a plea for mercy and were furious when the judge sentenced her to six months in Holloway, where she had a splendid time, with 'such a nice room', her own garden, goldfish and a newt. The governor, Colonel Milman, was 'a dear old soul' and on her release presented her with a signed photo. She reciprocated with one of her own: 'To my dear Governor, in grateful remembrance of six happy months in Holloway.' She lived to a ripe old age, still beautiful, still singing (among other pieces) Gounod's 'Ave Maria'. She left behind a diary of 60 years and 65 packing cases of papers. Her career is another reminder that the Victorian world is full of fascinating surprises: a splendid subject for an opera.
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