by J. D. Landis
But August Schumann had invented a way out of this quagmire of expense, complaint, and time-consumingness. At the time of the birth of his fourth son and last child, he was just beginning his new venture: the publication of pocket editions of European classics, something no one had ever done before in any country in any language! Not only would he publish German writers, like Goethe and Lessing* and Schiller, and Continental writers like Cervantes and Alfieri and Calderón, but he would also publish his beloved English writers, in particular Sir Walter Scott and George Gordon Lord Byron, and he would translate them himself, for he was as proficient in English as he was, like any worthy burgher, in Latin, Greek, and French.
Indeed, at the time he believed his son came yelping no differently from most babies into the world, he was sitting in his study humming some Scottish tunes by François Boïeldieu as he put the finishing touches on his translation of Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel, which he trusted would right the wrong done by Scott himself when he so mangled his English translation of Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen. Hanging in those few spaces where the thousands of books opened their teeth to the walls were several of Alexander Tibrich’s bucolic Saxon landscapes and a small but uncharacteristically violent painting (some years later to be of conventional prurient interest to the young Robert Schumann) by Januarius Zick of the murder of the men of Lemnos by the wives with whom they had refused to mate because, the men said, the women smelled bad.
“Herr Schumann, Herr Schumann, come!” cried the doctor’s assistant.
He leapt from his seat and spilled tobacco embers on his pants, which he brushed off and crushed into the Turkish rug—the same country of origin as his splendid weed—with his shoes. “What is it?” he called.
“It’s Napoleon!” cried the doctor’s assistant.
“I meant, is it a boy or a girl?”
“Napoleon is male,” he was informed.
By the time Robert was actually born, The Lay of the Last Minstrel was completed and August Schumann had succeeded in burning a hole in the crotch of his gabardines.
There had once been ten thousand people living in Zwickau. But by the end of the Thirty Years’ War, which virtually coincided with the end of the thousand-year Holy Roman Empire,* there were half that number. A century later—the century that Friedrich Schiller said went out with a storm so that the air might be cleared for the new century to be opened with murder—the population was further shrunk when Napoleon (now barely whispering Leporello’s lugubrious “Tra fume e foco” from Don Giovanni) and his troops returned. Defeated, diseased, and, because they had destroyed through the weight and drag of their caravan the alluvially fertile soil, famished, they subsisted, in the absence of sugar beets and alfalfa and coffee and even chicory, on roasted asparagus seed. They were on their doomed way to fight in Russia, where they’d end up sleeping in the steaming carcasses of disembowelled horses and bandaging their frightful wounds with paper ripped out of books from pillaged libraries (those urbane and foolish enough to stop to read bled to death but at least made their exits worthily occupied).* For every soldier who followed Napoleon to Russia, approximately one-sixth of a soldier returned, including the elite of the Dragoon, Chausseur, Polish Lancer, and Grenadier regiments of the Imperial Guard Cavalry. Here in Zwickau the civilians were victims of the very things that were killing the soldiers, except the townspeople were not being paid to die, and their survivors would receive no pensions, and the logic of death and therefore the meaning of life were absent: cannon balls, starvation, and typhus.
Robert’s mother caught the typhus, which was carried by the waters of the lakes and rivers into which corpses of men and animals had fallen or been slipped for serous burial. So Robert, the baby in the family, was sent to live with the Ruppius family. There he remained for two and a half years.
He returned home in that sunny period between Napoleon’s banishment to St. Helena in 1815 and the assassination in 1819 of the reactionary writer and spy for the Russians, August von Kotzebue. It was the latter that gave Metternich all the excuse he needed to begin censoring the press and oppressing all those demanding little university students who seemed to think that the only way to educate a mind was to open it first. The Emperor himself, Francis I, that veritable Justinian (whose closing of Athens’s schools of philosophy in 529 was to most rulers a touchstone of inspired tyranny), offered an equal exchange of scholar for obedient subject, the latter to arise, if necessary, out of the ashes of the former. Metternich met during most of August of that year in Karlsbad with representatives from ten of the dozens of German states, and there they passed, unanimously, decrees allowing their governments to punish any teacher who “spread dangerous ideas that would undermine public order and weaken the foundation of the State.” (In this, they were inspired by Louis de Saint-Just, the archangel of the French Revolution, who had succored all government when he said that even the Republic consisted in the extermination of everything that opposed it, and was himself relieved of the burden of his angelic face when it, along with the rest of his head, was guillotined from his less thoughtful parts in his twenty-seventh year.) They also created a Central Commission to coordinate and enforce censorship and through the unspeakable Untersuchungsgesetz installed the Federal Bureau of Investigation to uncover and punish “revolutionary agitation.”
The demanding and occasionally quite agitating little Robert Schumann himself found the coast clear enough to go back home to his parents and his mother sufficiently recovered from the typhus to have rediscovered her singing voice, which to Robert was a revelation of the first order.
For all the love he had found in the Ruppius house, there had been no music. There was virtually no music in all of Zwickau. Yes, there was a great Thuringian musical tradition, and all those Bach boys, once they removed the embarrassment of their father into an unmarked grave, had gone on to no small success. But the only musician presently to be found in Zwickau was found in the Church of Mary, for most people worked as clothmakers and cloth dyers and linen weavers and tanners and, though they almost died out after their exploitation by Napoleon’s army, blacksmiths.
But Christiane Schumann had sung. She had sung, she pretended, secretly, just the way her husband would sit in his study and pretend to be working on his publishing business or his translations when in fact—like so many publishers who fool themselves into believing that because they know how to read a book they will know how to write one, as if someone who has sat on the back of a horse were to believe he could now run as fast as a horse—he was writing. Under the seemingly unavoidable influences of Jean Paul Richter and E. T. A. Hoffmann and Hoffmann’s late mentor who died while still almost a boy, the irreplaceable Wilhelm Wackenroder, and Edward Young, whose Night Thoughts had brought August “deliriously and deliciously near madness” at the same age that Robert was when August was to confess this to him, August Schumann was turning out poems and tales of medieval knights and monks and cavaliers.
And Christiane had been singing. It was not as easy to sing secretly as it was to write secretly. Besides, Christiane didn’t want her singing to go unheard. She merely wanted anyone who heard it to love it. Here again the analogy can be made with her husband, the secret writer, who like any writer would happily display his work in progress to the eyes of others so long as it was understood that their criticism must consist entirely of praise.
Christiane, though she had been out of her sickbed for several weeks, went back to singing the day Robert returned from the Ruppius house. She did this not because she had any hint that Robert might be musical—he had been away for two and a half years and she didn’t know if he was finally trained to make his ploppers in a pot let alone if he could carry a tune—but because she was so happy to have him back and she knew of no better way to express her happiness than to sing.
So that day, when Frau Ruppius brought Robert to the door of the Schumann house at the corner of the market square and, with tears in her eyes, knocked on the door, she was not ans
wered immediately, because August Schumann, who had expected that his wife would attend first to the anticipated return of their son, was forced to come all the way out from his study.
His wife was in the parlor, its door open, playing the piano and, in her disease-diminished voice, singing her heart out.
She was singing an old Saxon love song, meant to express the happiness of a man whose betrothed (albeit a ghost) has returned to him after they had been separated by war. But it was just as beautiful in a woman’s voice and its words just as appropriate sung by a mother to her long-lost son:
Oh, now that you’ve returned to me
My life has done the same.
Without you I had lost my life,
My soul, my face, my name.
Without you I cannot exist.
Let death come take me too.
My heart is cold and empty when
My arms cannot hold you.
Hearing his mother sing, Robert rushed to her. He threw himself into her arms. But in fact it was the music into which he was throwing himself, because he did not know this woman, though he knew who she was.
Frau Ruppius stood weeping at the front door. August Schumann at that moment fell in love with his son through her and, to supply what little comfort he could as a substitute for his beautiful little boy, took her carefully in his arms.
Robert and his mother sang together every day. She called herself “the living book of arias.” She would play a song on a piano, they would sing it, and when they were done, he would play the same song on the piano. To her this was miraculous, as is a child’s playing by ear to many people, who have no idea that it is hardly an uncommon talent and must not, if a life of agony is to be spared the child, be used to determine that the child be pushed in any serious way into the all-consuming embouchure of music.
What Christiane did not realize should have prompted her to let her son be eaten alive, as he was destined to be, was what he did with a song after he had played it by ear. For then he would begin to bang away at it, change it, vary it, minor it, major it, syncopate it, ruin it, revitalize it, tear it apart, not quite put it back together but close enough. “Stop it!” she would say and sometimes put her hands over her ears. She should have known better.
But she did know enough to arrange for him to take piano lessons with the one musician in town, Johann Kuntsch, the church organist, who was not much of a musician himself and not even much of a teacher but who loved music and introduced his pupil not only to the four-hand pieces by the likes of Hummel, Weber, and the inevitable Czerny, and not only to the piano arrangements of the overtures and even of the symphonies of Haydn and Mozart, but to sonatas by the virtually unknown Beethoven, including the second movement of Les Adieux, and only two years after it was written, when Robert was seven, to the piano part of Schubert’s “Erlkönig,” and then, brand-new, when Robert was eight, to Beethoven’s Hammerklavier, Beethoven! who made Robert want to tell everybody else in the world about him, Beethoven! who everybody else in the world didn’t seem to want to hear about, or hear, at least in Zwickau, for he was too hard on the ears, they said, and this was in 1818. Robert was playing Beethoven in 1818 and was sick at heart and angry when people told him to play Rossini, Tancredi if he must, but please stop playing Beethoven because Beethoven hurt.
Fortunately, there was always one’s own work to which to turn in order to torture people.
*Gotthold Lessing was a distant relative of the Schumanns who had died some thirty years before Robert was born. What was to become Robert’s favorite story about his famous ancestor concerned not his celebrated plays or the audacity of his political liberalism but an incident that occurred late one night when Lessing arrived home and found he had forgotten his key. He knocked on the door, awakening his servant, who called down from his window on the third floor, from which he did not recognize his master, “Professor Lessing is not at home.” “Please tell him then,” responded Lessing, “that I shall call at another time.” With that, he walked off into the night.
*Whose duration as the First Reich inspired the optimistic and/or pessimistic prediction that the Third would last precisely as long.
*Not lost upon some of these bibliothanatic veterans of the Napoleonic wars in Germany was the coincidence of its having been a matter involving a book that had united many Germans against them. In 1806, Johann Palm, a merchant in Nuremberg, was executed by the French for selling Germany in Her Deepest Humiliation. Herr Palm went to his death shouting, “But I didn’t write it!” In fact, the book’s author was anonymous, which caused the French to kill as many Germans as possible in the belief that sooner or later the writer would join the bookseller in hell.
Karlsbad
AUGUST 4, 1818
Nearly thirty years ago in Karlsbad I saved as a sacred relic
one of the concert programs you had touched.
Robert Schumann
It is an amazing thing when a young person first experiences an art in its transcendence. There is a good chance this experience will destroy him, whether it inspires him to attempt such transcendence himself or discourages him from even the most meager of efforts in its pursuit. But there is no doubt that whether ultimately destroyed or saved, he is at that moment reborn. He is taken from his parents and released from the grip of duty. He is both freed from and bound to the past. He is coupled intimately and irrevocably with death, and is quite happy with the relationship. He is borne away on the wings of beauty from our inconsolably wretched earth.
When Robert’s father took him to hear the pianist Ignaz Moscheles, Robert was eight years old and Moscheles twenty-four, which is to say that as musicians the former was merely novitiate while the latter was stolidly, as he himself put it, entre deux âges.
Before Moscheles began to play, what most impressed Robert about him was his hair. It was curly and soft and fairly fluttered even in the still air of the salon, which was moist from the waters of the spa to which it was adjoined (architecturally and pecuniarily) and from which could be heard through the open double doors the splashing and gurgling and occasional sighing of people immersed in its waters and swathed in its steam and engulfed in its muds. On their way in to the salon, Robert and his father had passed by its patrons with their various afflictions: from what was then called dropsy, which caused swaying, saclike accumulations of fluid in their tissues; to sciatica, which caused its sufferers to walk as stiffly as the monster in Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus, which had been published in English earlier that year and that August was eager to translate and publish himself in German; to housemaid’s knee, which swelled the bursa of its victims so that they walked with what looked like ripe, burstable fruits on their knees, an ailment that, for the mostly bourgeois women in attendance at the spa, always brought with it the suggestion of deviant sexual practice rather than the household drudgery that had provided the malady its name.
Robert’s own hair was dark and thick and oily but had never been, until he saw Moscheles’s hair, a source of dissatisfaction. And it was not so much even then that he did not want his own hair as that he wanted Moscheles’s.
Moscheles was a bravura pianist, of the Viennese school, though he was known to straddle the Clementi convention, in which Robert himself had become interested when Herr Kuntsch had acquired a copy of Clementi’s new instruction book, Gradus ad Parnassum, which Robert had enjoyed using for the few minutes each day he spent studying before flying off into improvisations. But whereas Clementi was a devoted employer of, and advocate for, English pianos, Moscheles walked out over the floor of the salon and sat down at a piano made by Anton Walter in Vienna and, it had been whispered among a group of young patrons who seemed to have curled their hair like Moscheles’s, owned by Mozart before he’d had to sell it after his final, failed tour to Frankfurt in 1790, where his appearances had been grievously outdrawn by the coronation of Emperor Leopold II.
While he didn’t play Clementi’s personally endorsed brand of piano, Moscheles did pla
y his music.
The moment he began, Robert stopped looking at the pianist’s hair, resisted the temptation to look at his fingers, and simply closed his eyes.
It was Clementi’s Sonata in B-flat, which Robert had never heard but now, hearing, felt he would never stop hearing. True, there was something familiar about its opening theme, with its three-bar repeated succession of six eighth notes that Robert recognized as B-flat/F/B-flat. But beyond that theme, the music was wholly new and, if not wholly original, thrilling.
What dazzled him most was the playing. He had never heard anyone play the piano like this. He had not known the piano could be played like this. And, had he not been sitting there, he would not have believed that a piano ever would be played like this. This was, to his experience of piano playing, what the flight of an eagle was to a roasted pigeon. It was a new language, being spoken by a new being, being performed in a new world, being heard by a new boy who felt he was hearing it in confidence. He was destroyed by it, and what a luxury that was. His knees shook, his fingers trembled, his heart burst absolutely open, and—he was sure of it as he sat there sweating in that humid, heavenly room—his hair curled.
After this grand opening, Moscheles moved on, as was the custom, to some smaller works, all eight of Dussek’s boringly named Eight Pieces, which title made Robert wince when Moscheles announced it, though he recovered his admiration when he learned, also from Moscheles, that each of the eight pieces had its own name, Robert’s favorite of which—the name, not the piece—was “Consolation.”
