Ghost Variations

by Jessica Duchen

  ‘Alec won’t hear a word against it,’ Jelly said, confessing her misery. ‘He wants to get her out of London, in case there’s… trouble.’ Alec was convinced there would be another war with Germany.

  ‘That’s sensible, you know – and besides, she has to grow up sooner or later,’ Clara pointed out, cutting more cake. ‘Before you know it she’ll be writing you chirpy letters about lacrosse and sponge pudding.’

  ‘Do you think there will really be a war?’ Jelly asked.

  The moment of silence before Clara said, ‘Let’s pray that there may not be,’ spoke louder than her response.

  While Jelly and Clara talked, Tovey sloped away into the drawing room with the Schumann score. They could hear him humming and singing out loud to himself as he read through it at the piano.

  ‘Go on, Jelly,’ Clara said. ‘You’re itching to go and play it, I can see. Don’t worry, I won’t eat all the cake while you’re gone.’

  *

  Tovey launched into the first movement at exactly the pace Jelly wanted. Despite the pain and stiffness in his fingers, the music took wing: she was hearing it at last as it should sound, full of energy and great generous sweeps of Schumannesque heroism. She hadn’t told him that what he read of her violin part in the piano score might not be precisely what he heard; she and ‘Schumann’, together, via the glass game, had tweaked at some 200 bars, dotted about through the piece. Tovey kept going, lost in the music, his face ablaze with the thrill. Halfway through the slow movement, she noticed he was also blinking aside tears. Whether they were for the music, the long-desired playing of it, or the passing of time and of life, she couldn’t tell.

  It was only with the last notes of the Polonaise that the pair gave way to elation, laughing like the two children in a secret garden that they still were, behind their arthritic joints and painful tendons. Tovey whirled round on his revolving piano stool three times for joy. ‘You see what a splendid job Hindemith has made of it!’ he said. ‘You can trust every note.’

  ‘It’s not all Hindemith,’ Jelly smiled. ‘Some of the violin part is me. With a little, er, help. We’ve tried to make some… adjustments.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘The spirits and me.’

  ‘What?’ Tovey looked genuinely shocked. ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘They are incredible. They tell me everything, advise on everything.’

  ‘And they are who?’

  ‘Onkel Jo and Schumann, or their messengers, as we understand.’

  ‘Oh Jelly, Jelly… ’ He shook his head.

  ‘But that’s what happened – and you like what we’ve done. You just said so.’

  Tovey leafed through the pages on his piano, apparently pondering her words. ‘All right,’ he said, finally. ‘So, tomorrow we’ll sit down and make sure you’re happy with every last second of it.’

  Jelly was quietly relieved: she knew she still needed his expertise in analysing and perfecting the details.

  ‘This passage – it reminds me of something, I can’t place it… ’ She picked out the second theme of the first movement, the one that finally transforms into the Polonaise.

  ‘Could it be this?’ Tovey began to play another melody, one that she knew very well: the Brahms Violin Concerto, again the second theme of the first movement. The motif stood out: the same pattern, almost a twin to Schumann’s. This time, though, it seemed to link the wide swoops of the melody rather than making a statement in its own right.

  ‘You mean Brahms used Schumann’s theme? When did Brahms write his concerto?’

  ‘About 1878,’ said Tovey. ‘Twenty-two years after Schumann died.’

  ‘So – would he have heard Schumann’s, or looked at the manuscript?’

  ‘It’s perfectly possible, given Brahms’s astonishing brain, that he retained the impression of that melody, having seen it only once. I wouldn’t put it past him. Whether he viewed the manuscript again – well, who can say?’

  ‘But you think it’s deliberately done?’

  ‘There’s another possibility.’ Tovey was in lecture mode, thinking aloud rather than engaging in conversation, a pattern into which he often fell. ‘With Brahms, Schumann, Clara and Onkel Jo, it’s often a matter of a tribute. Their music is stuffed full of ciphers and symbols that were private references to one another. Take Brahms’s personal motto, F-A-F – frei aber froh, free but happy. That was based on Onkel Jo’s own one, F-A-E, frei aber einsam, free but lonely. Onkel Jo must have spotted all the Schumanneries and Clara-isms in Brahms, and if we had three clear days, I’d show them to you and you’d never hear a note of it the same way again. But now, listen to what happens in the Brahms Violin Concerto immediately after that little Schumann theme appears for the first time.’ He half-closed his eyes and played the extract by ear. ‘It’s the darkest, most inward-looking moment in the score, before all those strong rhythms banish it, and in comes the violin for the first time, Onkel Jo in full flood. Now that we have this context, I believe Brahms was thinking of Schumann when he wrote that, don’t you?’

  Jelly imagined she had lifted a lid and beneath it found an unsuspected universe of space and stars. Not that anything should surprise her now.

  ‘You see how vital it is that this piece should be played and known,’ Tovey said. ‘It doesn’t only tell us about itself; it tells us much about Schumann and perhaps even more about Brahms.’

  He stood and stretched his hands, wincing slightly at the pain in his knuckles. ‘Come along, Jelly, what about a little stroll before supper?’

  *

  Tovey’s idea of a ‘little stroll’ involved striding across country at a good five miles an hour. The flat fields were slick with mud and Jelly, in borrowed galoshes, picked her way round puddles and stray clumps of barley, trying to keep up.

  Around them lingered the quietness that always drew Tovey back to East Anglia. Here, in a slice of nature that seemed 90 per cent sky, he could listen to the music in his head without the intrusion of city sound-clutter. It was early evening and their shadows faded in and out, length and shape exaggerated.

  ‘Do you know, Jelly, of a woman named Bettina von Arnim?’

  ‘No? Who is she?’

  ‘Back in the 1850s she nearly became Onkel Jo’s mother-in-law. He was very much in love with her daughter, Gisela. He proposed, but was turned down and I don’t believe he ever got over it.’

  Jelly was astonished, never having heard this tale before. ‘What became of the girl?’

  ‘She was a fine writer of fairy tales and she married – much later – the son of Wilhelm Grimm, the younger of the Brothers Grimm. They were great literary types together. Then she had some nervous trouble, sadly, and eventually she died rather too young.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Jelly thought of Onkel Jo’s habitual severity – where had it come from? Perhaps the blow of Gisela’s rejection had given him part of his bitter edge. Tovey, with his giant paces, was pulling ahead, and she had to pause to free one of her boots from the mud.

  ‘I always wonder what explains “nervous trouble” in intelligent, married women,’ Tovey was musing. ‘My theory is that they’re simply bored to death. If society permitted them to develop real careers, I doubt this would happen so often.’ He barely bothered to veil his emotions – his first wife, Margaret, had succumbed to a similar problem. ‘Goodness knows it never happened to Clara Schumann,’ he added. ‘She was far too busy. And I know something of how your sister Hortense suffers, yet you and Adila, professional musicians, have never had a moment’s “nervous affliction” in your lives, have you?’

  ‘I’m sure people think we are a bit crazy, but that’s different.’ Jelly thought briefly of Adila’s terror of trains and ferries and her recurrent stomach problems – but that was rational in the first case, and physical in the second… wasn’t it?

  ‘Now, about Gisela’s mother. When Schumann was in the mental asylum at Endenich, it was almost impossible for anybody to visit him. Clara was barred by the doctors, for
fear of upsetting him. Jo went, and so did Brahms, when they were told they might see him. But then they found they were allowed literally only to “see” him: to observe him, from a distance, not speak to him.

  ‘Joachim at this point was about 22, in love with Gisela and spending what spare time he had paying court to her at her family home near Berlin. He’d have written to her, terribly distressed about Schumann. Therefore perhaps Bettina, the intellectual battleaxe, felt she should intervene for the sake of her daughter’s supposed beloved.

  ‘She was a woman of extraordinary character, charm and determination. She went all the way to Endenich and she talked the doctors round. Jo told me that Schumann’s doctors were quite horrible: cold, obstructive and cruel. But it occurs to me that where Jo was concerned, it’s possible they gave as good as they got. One’s attitude makes such a difference. Bettina, though, could talk the proverbial hind legs off a donkey, and somehow, goodness knows how, she was permitted access to Schumann himself.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘She came back,’ said Tovey, ‘and relayed to her daughter, and thence to Jo, that she thought Schumann was perfectly well.’

  ‘You are joking.’

  ‘Apparently she personally judged him sane and rational. And my goodness, she was angry. Bettina was a firebrand when she got into her stride, and she declared that Schumann was cruelly buried alive in that asylum, and that all it should have taken to get him released was the determination of Clara herself.’

  Jelly took a minute to absorb this. ‘So, Clara… ’

  ‘… possibly didn’t want him back.’

  ‘But – ?’

  ‘I know. It defies everything we know of their love and their devotion. On the other hand, one can perhaps understand it. She was in an impossible position; she was struggling with seven children and an international performing career. How could she also look after a husband who, even if Bettina thought him relatively well, would still have required much care and caused much anxiety? To say nothing of the gossip and the stigma. Clara may sometimes have seemed superhuman, but taking on that responsibility would be a step too far even for her, especially with small children in the house. His suffering was very real, remember – he’d already attempted suicide. It’s possible that Bettina had just caught him on a particularly good day.’

  ‘So… ’ Jelly followed Tovey across a wooden stile; he could take the fence in just three steps, while she was constricted by her straight skirt. He held out a hand to help her down.

  ‘Bettina was afraid he would make another attempt on his own life, in the hospital. She thought that if driven to desperation, he might starve himself to death. We don’t know if he did this or not. Clara, Brahms and Jo weren’t able to visit him until the day before he died.’

  ‘But did Clara say anything to Onkel Jo?’

  ‘Clara would never have said a word against her husband – or against her own attitude to him. Even if she had, in some moment of weakness or despair, Jo would never have broken her confidence.’

  ‘Donald, the messages – we’ve had some that seem to come from Schumann, or from messengers relaying his wishes, and some from Onkel Jo, too. But not a word about Clara, or Brahms. What do you think about that?’

  ‘I don’t think anything about any of your “messages”.’ Tovey paused in his tracks and mopped sweat from his temples with a handkerchief. ‘And nor, I fear, will many other people. I do worry that you’re allowing it to become too much of an obsession. Sooner or later you’ll have to accustom yourself to the idea that these practices are not so widely accepted now, not in this age of dictatorships, mechanisation and Einstein. But if it’s any comfort, Jelly, I don’t think you’re making it up.’

  ‘Making it up? But every letter came through the glass! I was never interested in the glass game before all this happened. I thought it was only a game – until, you see, there was a message from Sep and I ran away, I didn’t know what to believe… But this is different. Why don’t you join us for a session? Then you’d understand – you’d see it with your own eyes – and you’d… ’ Jelly was so distressed at the idea that his doubt might spoil their friendship that she could scarcely get her words out.

  ‘Hush, hush – it’s all right, really it is. I trust you. I just want you to be aware of the wider implications. Come along, let’s go back now and forget about it over the very nice dinner that Clara is making us, then get some sleep in this fresh country air. We can talk about your messages tomorrow. Sometimes things are clearer in the morning.’

  They were rounding a corner of a barley field; Jelly spotted the slope of the house’s russet roof and tiles, dappled with lichen. ‘We’ll smell dinner soon.’ Tovey rubbed his hands, smiling, Jelly sensed, a little too hard.

  They walked on, amid silence but for birdsong in the nearby oaks; Jelly, breathing the scent of damp fields, counted a blackbird, a lapwing and, far away, a lark.

  Tovey stopped abruptly in his tracks. ‘I forgot entirely why it was that I wanted to tell you about Bettina von Arnim! The concerto. The last movement.’

  ‘The Polonaise?’

  ‘Exactly. That Polonaise possibly signals the intervention of Bettina.’ He picked a strand of barley and turned it into a baton, conducting as if the crop were orchestral players spread across the field before him, while he sang the theme. ‘A polonaise, dignified, celebratory… ’

  ‘What’s that got to do with Bettina?’ Jelly pleaded.

  Tovey broke off in mid hum. ‘You know Chopin was exiled from Poland. He left just in time, shortly before the uprising of 1830, and missed his homeland for the rest of his life. He and Schumann were friendly and I’m sure he must have met Bettina, one way or another. She contrived to meet everyone, and he’d have been no exception. Poland was occupied, you see, by Russia, which won the war after the uprising, and freedom for Poland became a great cause célèbre in certain strata of mid-19th-century intellectual society. Demonstrations, pamphlets, marches, you name it. Bettina was very involved with freedom for Poland; you might call her an activist. She’d have discussed it with Schumann and with Jo. She bent everyone’s ear on the topic at length, whether they were interested or not. The polonaise was a national dance, a symbol of Polish pride and resistance. You remember how Schumann called Chopin’s mazurkas “cannons buried in flowers”?’

  ‘And – you think this Schumann polonaise is perhaps… a rifle in a rosebush?’

  Tovey laughed. ‘You have to understand, Jelly, because not many people do these days, that that was how their intimate musical circle worked. As I said, it was full of tributes, analogies, musical ciphers, coded messages. So – and this is really the point, for you – when it came to the question of what to do with the concerto after Schumann died, long after Gisela had turned Jo down, to him the piece may have felt a little bit close to the bone. It might have brought the pain of rejection back to life. Of course, he may also have had bona fide musical reasons for putting it away. What do you find most difficult in it, Jelly?’

  ‘The last movement is – well, not totally impossible, but – !’

  ‘Exactly. It’s a transcendent, dazzling, Polish-style statement. And it makes you wonder what he’s doing. But which is more alarming? The idea that Schumann didn’t know what he was doing? Or the notion that he knew exactly what he was doing, yet nobody understood?’

  *

  After dinner they went to the gramophone to sample the latest recordings he wanted to play her, and listened, late and long. Jelly was too overexcited to sleep and Clara observed her enthusiasm as indulgently as a grandmother might a toddler’s. But to the strains of Artur Schnabel playing Beethoven, Tovey nodded off in his armchair.

  Jelly could not enjoy the music as much without him. She watched him dozing, his thinning hair reflecting the lamplight, his chin dipping towards his chest. Once it would have been unthinkable for him to slumber through a note of music. The many years she had spent in his orbit, sitting at his feet, playing to his accompaniment or even
avoiding his declaration of finer feelings, spun before her as he began to snore. Look after him, dear Lord, Jelly prayed. Such great men are even rarer than pure memories in this world.

  *

  On a cloudless morning, the flowers holding sunlight captive in their petals, Jelly wandered alone onto Tovey’s lawn, listening to the clarity. A breeze stirred the columbines and lilacs so that they seemed to converse, their leaves offering consonants while the birds voiced the vowels. The garden was awake and singing.

  The Schumann concerto was hers. She and Tovey had brought it back to life. Today they’d play it through again, work on its details and know it better still. High above, a skylark was singing: a lark ascending. Shielding her eyes from the sun, she could glimpse the bird, a dark flickering speck against silver-blue; the sight so distant, the song so bright. This was perfection: solitude and nature, the eternal forces of growth and light.

  Let me always remember this, her mind whispered. Let this garden, this extraordinary morning, be my touchstone, no matter what lies ahead.

  Chapter 14

  On 23 September 1937, Alec, Adila and Jelly set out in the car for Erik’s book launch at his Portland Place residence. Adila wore a blue suit that matched her eyes, with a string of diamonds at her throat; Jelly chose russet red, a rope of pearls and a new hat.

  The build-up to the publication of Horizons of Immortality had been long and fraught while Erik struggled with his finalisation of the text and Adila checked and double-checked her transcripts and notes; and once the book had finally gone to print, the two of them busied themselves with more checking and double-checking, this time of the guest list for the party. All Jelly’s energy, meanwhile, was devoted to perfecting the concerto. Less than three weeks remained until the concert, which would follow hot on the heels of Kulenkampff’s German premiere. She might have learned Tzigane in three days, but she was younger then, with memory and bones altogether more supple; the Schumann, moreover, was three times as long and ten times as daunting.