Proust's Latin Americans

1 Reynaldo Hahn: Proust’s Latin Lover

1 Reynaldo Hahn Proust’s Latin Lover “Everything I have done in my life,” Proust confessed in 1904, “has been thanks to Reynaldo.”1 Of the Latin Americans studied in this book, Reynaldo Hahn (1874–1947) was the closest to Proust and the one who left the deepest mark in his life and work (fig. 1.1). Born in Venezuela to a South American mother and a German-Jewish father, he emigrated to Paris when he was three and quickly rose to fame as a singer and composer. By fifteen, he had gained fame as the child prodigy who set to music Victor Hugo’s verses “Si mes vers avaient des ailes.” By seventeen (fig. 1.2), he was studying under Jules Massenet at the conservatory, where Erik Satie was a classmate, and he premiered his first opera in Paris at twenty-four. He went on to have a brilliant musical career conducting and performing from London to Bucharest.2 Marcel was twenty-three and Reynaldo twenty when they met at a Parisian salon in the summer of 1894. The two had an instant intellectual connection , bonded over their shared passion for literature and music, and immediately began an epistolary exchange that would continue until Marcel’s death. The future novelist was no doubt dazzled by Reynaldo’s cosmopolitanism : Marcel did not speak any foreign languages and had barely traveled out of France; Reynaldo, in contrast, was fluent in Spanish, German, English, and French, had lived on two continents, and traveled across Europe to visit family or perform at concert halls. The two became inseparable. They saw each other in Paris, spent weekends in the country—at the château de Réveillon owned by Madeleine Lemaire , a rich hostess who would become one of the models for Madame Verdurin—and even went on a honeymoon of sorts. In 1895 they spent several weeks traveling in Brittany in what was then a remote area of the French countryside. (In a letter to Suzette Lemaire, reproduced in figure 1.3, Reynaldo complains that the region is so rough that his writing paper has 26 Reynaldo Hahn been covered by fly droppings!) Reynaldo and Marcel each found his way into the other’s work. Marcel dedicated one of his first stories, “La mort de Baldassare Silvande,” to “Reynaldo Hahn, poet, singer, and musician.”3 And Reynaldo wrote a series of melodies to accompany Marcel’s “Portraits de peintres,” which the two friends performed together on several occasions4 and which were later included in Les plaisirs et les jours (1896), Marcel’s first book.5 Marcel also paid homage to Reynaldo in his first novel, Jean Santeuil, which he began writing around the time they met (and which remained unpublished during his lifetime). One of the main characters is a young aristocrat named Henri de Réveillon, whose initials are an inversion of Reynaldo Hahn’s. Years later, when he published À la recherche du temps perdu, Marcel would also pay tribute to his friend by having Doctor Cottard appear at the Verdurin salon during the war wearing a uniform that resembled a coronel from Reynaldo Hahn’s opera L’île de rêve.6 When they first met, Reynaldo was already a successful composer, but Marcel had not published much beyond a few articles in newspapers and journals. Over the years, Reynaldo’s fame grew as he premiered operas, created works for the Ballets Russes, published books, and performed around Europe. Marcel, in contrast, was an aspiring and unrecognized writer and Figure1.1.Nadar,portraitofReynaldoHahn,June6,1898.Ministèredelaculture/Médiath èque du Patrimoine, Inv. NA23815439. Distributed by RMN/Art Resource, New York. Proust’s Latin Lover 27 would not be recognized as an important author until the publication of Swann’s Way in 1913, almost two decades after their first meeting. Only then did the two friends seem to be on an equal footing, though that lasted only a few years: Marcel’s fame surpassed Reynaldo’s after he won the Prix Goncourt in 1919. Marcel and Reynaldo were lovers for only a few years, but they remained close friends—Reynaldo was one of last visitors Proust received on his deathbed—and exchanged playful, flirtatious letters until Proust’s death. In many ways, the two had parallel lives: they were both gay and half-Jewish; they were both born to wealthy, bourgeois families; they both chose creative careers; they were...