Marriage

Dear friends of piano music,

in the Christian marriage vow it says "I promise you my trust in good and bad days, in health and illness, until death do us part. I want to love, respect and honor you all the days of my life ... . "What is meant by" respect and honor "is perhaps a matter of interpretation. In the 19th century and well into the 20th century in Germany it was not customary for a woman to be allowed to perfect her talents in the same way as a man, provided he had the appropriate financial means. This was even more true of a married woman, and it was also utterly improper for women from higher social classes to make money in art or other activities. So one cannot necessarily expect from an "respecting and honoring" husband that he violates social conventions in order to allow his wife to develop her personality in a manner that is atypical of the time. But this is exactly what I mean by "respect and honor". When I found out that the composer Josephine Lang had done a lot of work before and after her marriage, but not a single piece in the years of their life together with the after all poetic law professor Reinhold Köstlin, I was somewhat shocked. I asked myself, weren't there couples in the 19th and early 20th centuries who were artistically active together, who granted each other the necessary freedom that an artistically active person, regardless of gender, needs like the air to breathe ? Clara and Robert Schumann are of course an example, but their marriage only lasted 16 years, Clara was from the beginning the more famous and successful, above all financially more successful, so that her busy concert activity was simply an economic necessity for the large couple. I imagine the life and work of Fanny Hensel (née Mendelssohn) and her husband Wilhelm, the successful Berlin court painter, to be particularly harmonious. While the Mendelssohn family was on the one hand very wealthy on the other hand very keen on social acceptance and Fanny was only allowed to be artistically active in private, Wilhelm supported her as much as he could, after her death he published some of her works against the will of the Mendelssohn family. I am deeply moved by the idea of ​​Fanny sitting at the piano and playing and composing, while Wilhelm sat next to his easel painting, both absorbed in their activities and yet united.

The lovers Auguste Rodin and Camille Claudel may serve as another example, but they never shared a common bourgeois existence. Nevertheless, one has the impression that the years with Auguste were the most artistically and mentally stable for Camille, after the separation she suffered increasingly from paranoia, destroyed a larger part of her works and was loved by her mother and brother for the last 30 years of her life housed in a mental institution where she eventually died of complications from malnutrition.

Another example, which always seemed like the ideal connection in love and work, are Marie and Pierre Curie. Of course they were scientists, but for me the only difference is in the field of activity. Standing together in the laboratory, years together, dedicated to important joint projects - I hope I'm not idealizing too much here, but I can hardly imagine a greater fulfillment. It came to an abrupt end when Pierre got caught in a horse-drawn vehicle and died at the scene of the accident. Marie suffered greatly from this sudden loss, struggled with depression, but never lost sight of the shared visions. We all know how successful she was, double Nobel Prize, first female professor at the sorbonne, but the careless handling of the radium that ise discovered increasingly damaged her health and was the cause of her death. I know I'm a hopeless romantic - this notion of shared devotion to art or science is the ideal version of "love, respect, and honor" for me.

Kerstin