Books: Richardson’s Richard

THE YOUNG COSIMA—Henry Handel Richardson—Norton ($2.50).

A musical novel called Maurice Guest opened (pianissimo) Henry Handel Richardson’s career in 1908. Richardson’s next book, The Getting of Wisdom (1910), struck a chord that made listeners sit up: how did this man get to know so many intimacies of life in an Australian girls’ college? When, in 1929, the same author’s Ultima Thule packed them in to standing room, the audience insisted on the virtuoso’s taking a bow. To their surprise, the bow turned out to be a curtsy.

Henry’s real name was Henrietta (Handel thrown in for musical effect). Born into a family of amateur tooters and strummers in Melbourne, she attended the Presbyterian Ladies’ College there, later studied music at the Leipzig Conservatory. Writing was a sidetrack which turned out to be her main line. She took the masculine pseudonym, she says, because she did not want allowances made for her.

Though it is miles this side of Ultima Thule, her newest book, The Young Cosima, will have allowances made for it. Reason: it concerns the most fantastic romance of the most fantastically romantic of composers, Richard Wagner. Wagnerian freshmen who think the Tarnhelm* was something to steer a boat with will take to the book no less than initiates, for the triangle has a dependable literary as well as musical tinkle. In this case: a great man wanting sympathy, a young man wanting love, an intensely ambitious young woman no more capable of love than a piano stool.

Even Wagner’s fans cannot deny that his operas are lush. His love affairs were more so. Richard found it even harder to edit his morals than his scores, and scarcely less numerous than his leitmotivs were his lady-friends. Most soothing of all, according to Miss Richardson, was Cosima, daughter of one close friend, Composer-Pianist Franz Liszt, wife of another, Pianist-Conductor Hans von Bülow. But readers will find that what Cosima did to take the crinkles out of Richard’s brow put them double-deep onto Franz’s and Hans’s.

*A magic casque which made its wearer invisible.