by J. D. Landis
Robert was surprised at first to hear Moscheles speak. It troubled him. He had not expected this man to have a voice. He did not want him to have a voice, or at least a voice that not only would he understand but that would be youthful and modest and altogether too human.
“Before Jan Dussek,” Moscheles addressed his listeners, “the pianist might sit facing his honored audience, or even with his back to it, but no pianist sat sideways to the audience. And now we all do, which makes one wish one had a better profile!”
Better profile! No man had ever been more beautiful, more heroic-looking than this one.
Moscheles ended his recital, as was also the custom, with work of his own composition, much to the delight of those who seemed to know the piece when he played the first note and thus gasped audibly and then gazed about with undisguised hauteur: “Alexander’s March.” There seemed not one of his skills he left unexplored and unexploited in these variations, with their chords succeeding one another with such rapidity that Robert looked around to try to find the other, hidden piano. And while he was looking, he happened to be the first person in the audience to see a naked young man, dripping wet, come dancing wildly through the double doors at the back of the salon, his limbs jerking, his shoulders rolling grotesquely, and his face twisting weirdly as if a huge, invisible hand were squeezing it in rhythm to the music.
As the man danced his way down among the audience, people gasped yet again, and ladies either covered their eyes or used their hands to dry themselves when the man dripped spa water upon them.
When he reached Moscheles at the piano, the man stopped—his progress, not his dancing. In fact, now that he stood in one place, he danced more wildly than ever, quavering, wriggling, virtually convulsing right there at the side of Moscheles, who rather than seeming to be disturbed by this peculiar interruption played all the more wildly and passionately himself, glancing over at the man when he wasn’t looking down at his fingers that moved so fast they appeared to be gloved.
Robert found himself both angry at the man and envious of him. Moscheles was smiling at him. Moscheles was playing for him. Moscheles was inspiring him. And the man was unafraid to display his passion for the virtuosity that seemed to be turning his body into the very music itself.
It was all Robert could do to sit there and not get up and dance himself.
He might have done just that had “Alexander’s March” not reached its conclusion and Moscheles risen to bow first at the audience and then at the strange dancer, who, as the last note was echoing through the salon, seemed to quiver with it as it passed through him and then stood there completely still, turned sideways between Moscheles and the audience with his hands now resting modestly over his recently circumrotating private parts.
“I’m cured,” whispered the young man, just loudly enough for Robert to hear.
“What did he say?” asked Robert’s father, who had his arm around his shoulder.
“He’s cured,” Robert explained.
“As a shoulder of ham,” said Robert’s father, who was fond of wordplay.
It turned out that the young man had chorea, otherwise known as St. Vitus’s dance. For all the good it had done him, he had been taking the waters when the sound of the music inspired him both to seizure and to dance, which in his case were the same. But perhaps inspiration had indeed proven cure. He now stood next to Moscheles wrapped in a towel that had been provided, thoughtfully, by some staff members of the spa who had been prepared to throw a net over him and had been deterred from this necessary maneuver only when his seizure had ended completely coincident with the completion of Moscheles’s playing.
Robert was desperate to approach Moscheles, which his father had urged him to do and to tell him that he, too, was a pianist. Yet Robert was unsure of the etiquette. There were others hovering near Moscheles. But no one was close enough to him to speak except the young dancer, who was engaging the great pianist in a visibly passionate if one-sided discussion. All the others seemed to be waiting for him to finish before drawing closer.
While the young man spoke directly into Moscheles’s ear, which required him to stand on tiptoe, Moscheles nodded not so much patiently as desperately. His kind eyes wandered along the decorative molding where the salon walls met its ceiling, until finally his gaze drifted slowly down through the room and landed right on Robert. There was no question about it! Herr Moscheles was looking at him! And in his look was entreaty.
Robert went to him.
“Thank God,” whispered Moscheles.
“What did you say?” asked the young man, who stepped down from Moscheles’s ear and looked at Robert as if to ask how dare he presume.
“I was saying,” said Moscheles, “‘thank God you have been cured.’ And what brings you here?”
“St. Vitus’s dance,” said the young man. “As I was telling you.”
“I was speaking to this young man.”
Moscheles held out his hand to Robert. Robert looked at it as though it were made of glass.
“Don’t worry,” said Moscheles. “If you break it, I know plenty of pieces for the left hand.”
Robert slid his hand into Moscheles’s. He closed his eyes as he did so.
“It doesn’t really work that way—generally, one has to practice,” said Moscheles. Could he read minds as well as he played the piano? “And you must bear in mind that most pianists would rather cut off one another’s hands than pass along inspiration through them, though you should feel free to hold mine for as long as you like.”
“Let me hold the other one,” said the young man in the towel.
“Are you a pianist too?” asked Moscheles.
“I’m a law student.”
“Oh, my,” said Moscheles. “In that case I think I’d best hide both my hands.” He winked at Robert before withdrawing his right hand from Robert’s grasp.
“I am a pianist,” said Robert.
“I could tell,” said Moscheles.
“From my hands?” asked Robert.
“No. I could feel you listening to me secretly as I played.”
“You could?”
“Absolutely.”
“Truly?” Robert could not believe he was doubting Moscheles. It was like telling a god you mistrusted his powers.
“What about the Clementi?” said Moscheles. “Did it not remind you of something else?”
“Yes!”
“Aha! And do you know what it was?”
Robert shook his head.
“Let me give you a hint.” Moscheles put his hand on Robert’s shoulder and drew him away from the young man in the towel, but the young man followed them step for step.
“Clementi played that same sonata—the B-flat—in a famous duel. Remember what I told you about pianists wanting to cut off one another’s hands. It never goes quite that far, thank God, but we are always dueling with one another. We meet like gladiators, either in person, in someone’s salon where the spectators scream for us to pour out our music like so much blood, or in the press, where we put our reputations in the hands of those whose hands can no more play the piano than they can dress a grouse. It is that way between Johann Nepomuk Hummel and me in Vienna. And if you know anything about Hummel, you know he thinks he has revolutionized the playing of the piano by insisting that trills be commenced on the primary note and not on the note half a step above, which, if you’ve ever tried it, has the same effect on music as ironing her hair does for a woman—it removes the frisson, as it were.”
Frisson was perhaps the wrong word to use around the young man with the towel, though Robert had studied enough French, what with his dear father’s insistence on the primacy of language, to appreciate the pun Moscheles was making. However, at the very pronunciation of the word frisson, the young man began to shudder once again. And it was not long before the shudders turned to twitches, the twitches to spasms, the spasms to ictuses, the ictuses to throes, until finally his entire body was once again involved in a disturbing convulsion
that carried him dancing off back toward the double doors and the bubbling baths whence he had arrived.
Herr Moscheles shook his head sadly at his departing admirer and said, “So much for the curative powers of music. Or at least its lasting effects. Now, where were we?”
It was a moment before Robert could take his eyes from the poor dancing man, who was maintaining, Robert realized, the rhythm of the last of the “Alexander’s March” variations. “Duels,” he answered finally, as he realized that he and Moscheles were now surrounded by all the people who had apparently been afraid to approach so long as the St. Vitus dancer was in close attendance.
“Ah, yes,” said Moscheles, ignoring the others and looking straight down at Robert. “I was about to ask you if you knew just who it was Clementi was dueling with when he played the B-flat Sonata. Answer that and you will be a long way toward knowing of what, indeed, that sonata reminds you. Here, I’ll give you a hint: The duel took place in 1780.”
“That’s a hint?”
Moscheles put his chin in his hand, which struck Robert as a strange use for a hand so accomplished, and said, “Not much of one, I admit. How about this: Mozart!”
“The duel was with Mozart?”
“Absolutely.”
“The Magic Flute!” exclaimed Robert, as at once Clementi’s opening theme, with the rising repetition of eighth notes, echoed in his mind with the same theme from the Overture to that opera, which he had also attended with his father and had made him dream not of playing the piano but of conducting an orchestra, for he had never seen an orchestra before that.
Moscheles said not another word but settled his hand on Robert’s hair, patted it twice, and then, without speaking to anyone else, walked modestly through the crowd, which honored him by standing out of his way.
All the bumpy, endlessly swift way home, Robert could feel that hand in his hair, curling it and otherwise passing on its magic.
Zwickau
MAY 12 1824
The great object in life is sensation—to feel
that we exist—even though in pain.
Lord Byron
The new Streicher, a grand, had finally been delivered to the Lyceum from Vienna, and Robert was the first to play it publicly, for the whole school.
The headmaster, Karl Richter, fetched Robert from his Latin class the moment the piano arrived and took him into the theater where the workmen were consolidating it under the supervision of the tuner, who had come all the way from Leipzig.
“I want you to play the first note,” said Herr Richter to Robert. “For me.”
“What note would you like it to be?”
“You choose,” answered Herr Richter.
Neither of them could wait, so even before the piano was tuned, Robert stood before it—its bench had not yet arrived, it was coming by land whereas the piano had been shipped by water—and played a B-flat.
“Very nice,” said Herr Richter. “What is it?”
“B-flat,” said Robert. “Listen.”
He played an A and named it. He played a C and named it. He played now a B-natural and named it. Then he played a brief fugue on those four notes.
“Bravo,” said Herr Richter.
“It’s Bach,” said Robert.
“I thought it sounded familiar.”
Robert wasn’t sure whether to smile but found himself smiling before discretion could be exercised. “Bach didn’t write it,” he explained. “It’s Bach’s name. I made it up.”
“You could have fooled me,” said Herr Richter.
Robert held his tongue this time.
“And you certainly did,” Herr Richter supplied the rejoinder and threw his arm around Robert’s shoulder.
Robert loved Herr Richter’s school. It was, in the perfect adjunct to the education he received at home from his bookish, dreamy, but business-minded father and his father’s library of nearly five thousand volumes, a means of exploding him into the world.
Herr Richter, in addition to his duties as headmaster of the Lyceum, edited a political review called The Bee,* which prompted the first real discussion father and son had about politics, when Robert learned that his father harbored for all humanity passions Robert had thought were reserved for himself. This made Robert begin to mistrust politics at nearly the same moment he had begun to embrace them. His father learned that his son was not nearly as interested in all humanity—in any humanity, for that matter—as he was in music, which even then he knew could serve no purpose but its own and that of its creator.
Actually, there was a part of humanity for which Robert harbored the utmost passion, but he did not feel he would be comfortable discussing this with his father, who, for all his love of Byron’s work, seemed almost haughtily disdainful of the poet’s vaunted love life, which any fool should realize, Robert knew, could not be separated from the popularity of his poetry, any more than you could skin a cat and expect people to hold their hand out to it, calling, “Pussy, pussy.”*
The previous winter when he went with a group of friends into the mountains, he saw Liddy Hempel riding on the sleigh before his own. As her body vibrated with the ruts in the path and bounced with the rocks and roots, he could see and feel himself grasp her from behind and lift her coat and skirts and slide beneath her and pull her down upon himself and join himself to her in a way that had inflamed his thoughts ever since.
What shamed him was not so much the imagining of it as the secrecy. No one knew but he. Yet when he discussed it with himself, it got only worse. Try to have a civilized discussion with yourself about your wholly fantastical love life and you end up less illuminated and more aroused than when you began. If you can’t talk to yourself, to whom can you talk?
His best friend, Emil Flechsig, was away at school, which Robert thought might make confession easier, so he wrote Emil a letter and told him about his vision of Liddy Hempel and his belief that when the pleasures of the senses become dominant, “man becomes an animal, and that’s exactly what I was.”
Though Robert was not shameless enough to put this into the letter, when he wrote those words he found himself immediately thereafter whinnying like a horse as he sat there at his desk. And not only that, but in desiring Liddy Hempel, he was being unfaithful to Nanni Petsch! “It is Nanni Petsch with whom I was first secretly in love, Emil! I have all the symptoms—whenever I see her, my hands sweat and shake, my voice trembles, I get dizzy. And this is with the girl I don’t picture taking from behind like the aforementioned horse!” Robert added, unaware that he had no more actually mentioned the horse in his letter than he had truly learned the nature of desire or even, in his innocence, how to dampen at least the edges of its fire when you are alone and frightened and paralyzed by inexperience. “Oh, Emil,” Robert concluded, “on your chest, on your understanding bosom I must pour out my heart. I have no friend but you. I have no beloved but you. I have nothing and no one but you.”
When Emil’s response to this outpouring was not answers but questions—“Dear Robert: Have you lost your mind? Your friend, Emil Flechsig. P. S. Is not, as I recall, Liddy Hempel’s backside big enough for the two of us?”—Robert realized he had best discuss this with a woman.
He thought of his mother first, but when he realized what he was suggesting to himself he was too ashamed to join the family for supper that night, which made matters worse because it brought his mother knocking on his door to find out what was the matter and interrupting him as he was precisely in the middle of the kinds of thoughts he was trying to protect her from by not discussing them with her in the first place.
This left his sister, Emilie.
She was fourteen years older than Robert but was of all the girls in the world the one to whom he felt the closest. He thought of her as a girl even though he knew that by the world’s standards she was now a woman and even though he knew that when he was her age he would be far away from Zwickau, writing poems in a small hut in an utterly silent primeval forest or playing the piano on the top f
loor of a vast town house in a cacophonous, cosmopolitan city, one or the other he was sure, he just didn’t yet know which.
Sometimes he daydreamed of taking Emilie with him. As it was, she rarely left her room, which had been converted out of the attic on the third floor when they’d moved to a bigger house at Number 2 Amtsgasse just off the market square, and never, any longer, left the house.
There was something wrong with her skin. Two minute, itchy spots—one on her forehead and one on the back of her right ankle—had appeared when she was not much younger than he was now. From these, an infection had grown, a plague had crept, a fire had spread down her body and up her body, reddening her skin and sometimes leaving her with an itch so bad that she begged him to take her by the wrists and not let go until the temptation to scratch had subsided.
“Come, little Robert,” she would say. “Hold me hard. It will make your hands strong.”
True enough. Emilie was a great advocate of his piano playing. He repaid her support and the hand-strengthening that came from his nursing her by performing for her whenever she wanted, whatever he might be doing, however much he might prefer to be reading or setting off for a hike into the forest with one of his friends. But there had come a time when she stopped asking him to perform, a time when the spread of her rash had made her isolate herself increasingly in her room. To get her out, Robert would play the piano, louder and louder, more and more to the understandable irritation of the rest of the family, for hour after hour if necessary, until finally Emilie would appear, dressed in the simple but pretty white dress she always wore whether in or out of her room, pulled into life by the music. He would see her through the parlor doors glide down the stairs with each foot turned daintily out like a princess at a ball, a ballerina come to Earth from Heaven, and she would give him an impish smile as she entered, as if to say, “All right, you sneak, you got me down here,” as if he were a Siren and she were Odysseus, though he realized she really was Penelope, alone in her room while the very fabric of her body was undone.
