Gluck, Diana Souhami [good novels to read in english txt] 📗

with us, but he said he did not want them.… He was very quiet and out of the blue he proposed. I was amazed and said ‘I thought you were in love with Miriam!’.… I protested that I was too young to get married and had my career to think of.… The sudden proposal and his determination not to be refused overwhelmed me as I was very young and had no thoughts of marriage but only of my career … I capitulated, but only on the condition that my parents consented.4

That same afternoon he wired to her parents in Chicago: ‘Will you consent to my engagement to your daughter Frances? Can offer her good home and will be true yiddisher husband, at any rate will try. My family are well known and respected in England …’ The same night, in the middle of the night, without stopping to look through it for correction and in an excited state of mind, he wrote them a six-page letter about himself, his business situation, finances, his family, a referee on his behalf they might consult in New York and his confidence that he and Francesca would be very happy together. ‘I am only at present able to picture you in my mind’s eye as the Parents of a most charming, darling and good Jewish girl,’ he told them and explained, ‘I am not given to what is known as gush, having been trained simply as a commercial man.’ He finished the letter with an exhortation to them to answer promptly, and a hint at the new status their daughter, if married to him, would acquire: ‘I have explained to Frances that it will be necessary for her to give up all ideas of musical study as I could not allow my wife to work for her living …’5

Six weeks later the couple married. On her own admission Francesca had not, prior to those six weeks, even considered Joseph Gluckstein in an amorous light. But she did not hesitate, and her parents were keen. For the Gluckstein family, after so much intermarrying, the arrival of this nineteen-year-old, redheaded American singer, of unknown family and with no dowry, was something of a shock. But it was not viewed as so perilous an aberration as if one of their daughters were to have taken a shine to an unknown artist of modest means. Such a romance would have been strongly opposed. And when Gluck followed her own unorthodox heart, her behaviour, unsurprisingly, was thought to be beyond the pale. But Joseph Gluckstein was old enough, senior enough and man enough to be allowed to know his mind. In adult life Gluck saw her mother’s truncated career and marriage into The Family as the sacrifice of Art to Money and the coercion of woman to a subordinate status. She thought of her mother as a beautiful opera singer and saw her as a captive spirit. Gluck defined honesty and truth as the following of desire and the fulfilment of talent. When her mother was widowed and in her sixties, she urged her to recapture her adolescent self, ‘the real you, what you were before you married’.

The Gluckstein wedding reception was a grand affair at Olympia where J. Lyons & Co. had the catering rights. The Hallés, who still had small children to look after, could not be there, but the bride wore her mother’s wedding veil of Brussels lace handed down, mother to daughter, for generations. The married pair sailed to the States to honeymoon and for the new relatives to get acquainted. Meanwhile a house in West Hampstead, with two bathrooms on the insistence of Francesca, was built for the couple to live in on their return.

In this house Gluck was born, eleven months after the marriage, on 13 August 1895. Her father would have preferred a boy – firstborn sons were highly valued for their potential as directors of the business – but her father’s hopes for her were that she should grow up as beautiful as his wife, as devoted as his mother and as conscious of family loyalties and responsibilities as them all. She was given the name Hannah, like her grandmother and not a few of her cousins and aunts. His son and heir, Louis Hallé, was born, to his great joy, eighteen months later. Gluck was a small baby, her brother, large. At birth, the doctor remarked that he was the size of a three-month child. He grew to two metres, or six foot seven-and-a-half inches. Gluck reached five foot six. At no point in her childhood was she taller than her younger brother, a provoking state of affairs for a small girl. And she was to learn through The Family’s patriarchal focus that being born a girl was a handicap when it came to questions of power, work, and control of money.

The children had everything money could buy and everything their ancestors had been denied. They wore fine clothes, had seaside holidays and on Sundays went for drives to Hyde Park in the family carriage. They had singing lessons and piano lessons. The Lyons caterers created for them birthday cakes of extravagance and ingenuity – trains, with chocolate engines, carriages and the like. From their nursery window they saw a performing bear, pavement artists, and barrel organs playing ‘Dolly Gray’ and ‘Soldiers of the Queen’. There were outings and treats galore. In their parents’ box at the Royal Opera House they saw Melba in Rigoletto, and Caruso and Tettrazzini in La Bohème, which made them giggle. They went to the Hippodrome and the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. They saw The Waltz Dream, The Merry Widow, The Dollar Princess, The Arcadians, Pelissier’s Follies, the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas and Alexander’s Ragtime Band. But pleasure had its place. There was a strong emphasis on education, virtue and correct behaviour. They were made aware that they had not only The Family’s traditions to live up to, but the added responsibilities of opportunity and