by J. D. Landis
“But I don’t have any money.”
“The money will come in time,” he said. “What I want from you now, and why I bought you this new piano, is for you to begin to prepare to play for others.”
“But I’m too young.” She punctuated her words by hammering softly on his knees.
“Not young,” he answered. “Only inexperienced. At your age Mozart was a great success in Vienna. Music is more the emperor in Vienna than the emperor himself, and in Vienna more than half the concert musicians are under fourteen. What you must understand, Clara, is that music does not choose or need as its vessel some ancient pot. There are children who can play their instruments as if they were limbs on their bodies.”
She looked at the large, six-octaved piano before her and opened her huge eyes amusedly.
“You make me laugh,” he said. “Very few people make me laugh.”
“You make me make you laugh.”
He thought for a moment and then asked, “How do I do that?”
“By only pretending to be stupid.”
Now he didn’t know whether to laugh or chasten her, and his very indecision forced him to laugh again.
“You see,” she said.
He put his arm around her. “If I could keep you to myself, I would. But God would never forgive me.”
“I’m not going to run off and get married that soon, Papa.”
He removed his arm and took her by both shoulders. “Listen to me, Clara. Girls are playing music all over Europe. One can’t go anywhere without hearing of what Leopoldine Blahetka is performing in Vienna or Anna de Belleville in London and especially Marie Moke in Paris, Marie Moke, to whose playing it is said people are deaf because they are blinded by her beauty, which is as nonsensical as it is heretical.”
“No one will ever be blinded by my beauty,” said Clara, wiggling her shoulders so that he released her.
“Thank goodness,” said her father, celebrating the anniversary of his divorce with precisely the kind of insensitive remark that had sent his wife into the arms of another man. “What I’m telling you, Clara, is that these girls are older than you but started younger than you and that you are starting older than they but will be greater than they long before you are as old as they are now. They are not even your competition, though the world will judge them so at first. But your true competition will be the Moscheleses and Kalkbrenners of this world. Make no mistake about it—music itself may be pure, but the performance of it in public is always more duel than divertissement. And these girls… these girls will disappear. They always do. They play until they can be judged wunderkinder no longer, and then they marry and become musicians to the court or teachers, because that allows them to stay at home and care for their husbands and children. That is not the life I choose for you. Do you understand? A woman need not succumb to the diminished expectations with which society pretends to alleviate her lot. You will be a woman one day, but this does not mean you must sacrifice your life and your genius to custom and to the pressures of the temperate. Do you understand?”
Without a moment’s hesitation, she said, “No.”
Once again, she’d made him laugh.
Zwickau
AUGUST 10, 1826
The specter of dead people appears to be pursuing me.
Robert Schumann
When August Schumann dropped dead at his desk at the age of fifty-three,* there was no one in the house but Robert and the ghost of Emilie. His brothers lived elsewhere. His sisters lived elsewhere too, wherever it was that whatever of us, if anything, survives, goes. His mother was in Karlsbad, taking the waters.
Robert was alone with his father, he playing the piano, his father working concurrently on his encyclopedia of Saxony** and his translation of Byron’s Manfred and a novel about a woman poet forced to travel backward in time to confront the curse put upon her centuries before by an evil doctor who believed that eternal life was to be found in the dew that appeared on her skin when she was ecstatic.
Robert’s amiable father, who had once written seven novels in eighteen months, was never so busy that he didn’t welcome an interruption from his cherished son, who now decided to visit him in his study. Robert had lately been in torment over what he felt was the need to choose between music and literature. He wanted to be a musician and thus to live within what Hoffmann called the spirit realm, like Hoffmann’s own Johannes Kreisler, about whom he could no longer think without thinking too of Emilie, asleep now in “the paradise of utter peace.” Hoffmann—who had said that music’s subject was the Infinite, the secret Sanskrit of Nature that fills the heart with endless longing. And what was life itself but endless longing? Yet Hoffmann himself was a writer, as was Jean Paul, and they were his heroes more than anyone else, more even than Ignaz Moscheles and Carl Maria von Weber.
Robert was forced to admit to himself, as he got up from the piano, that another reason he had decided to see his father was because of Weber himself. Weber had died in London not two months ago. Now Robert was attempting to learn Weber’s Sonata in A-flat. He had taken this difficult task upon himself as a kind of memorial to the creator of Der Freischütz, perhaps the greatest German opera* (how the scene in the wolf’s glen had frightened Robert and simultaneously aroused his desire!) and the Wertherian figure who at an age barely greater than Robert’s now had swallowed some of his father’s engraving acid and, while not succeeding in dying, had rotted out his voice into a sensuous rasp. But this sonata! There were chords in it that Robert simply couldn’t stretch to play. There were chords in it that made him bang his overstrained hands upon the keyboard and then look down at them disdainfully as if they were disobedient students and think of slitting them at each digit’s webbing so he could watch his blood drip down between the keys as finally he achieved the vagrant fingerings.
When he could take no more of it, or of the doubts in which his failure stained his art, he went to seek the aid of the man he loved beyond all other men: affectionate father, passionate poet, sensitive observer of mankind’s frailties, generous benefactor.
When he entered the study, what struck him first was how little it smelled of his father’s cherished Turkish pipe tobacco. It was in his father’s honor, not to mention his footsteps, that Robert had taken up the smoking of cigars, a pipe having proven too difficult to keep lit and a cigar much more in accordance with his image of the rakish artificer.
Then he was perplexed at how his father not only didn’t greet his entrance with his usual “Ah, Robert” but seemed fast asleep upon his papers, books standing around his cradled head like so many tombstones. He had always worked too hard—his doctor and his wife had said as much. He’d claimed he couldn’t rest nor since the death of Emilie even sleep at night, which Robert understood because the same was true of him. Her leaving them had left them both, of all the family, most bereft.
Now, as he stood before his father, afraid to touch him for fear he would not wake no matter how caressed, Robert felt upon himself the touch of Emilie. She grasped his wrists. He could not move his hands and felt she would not let him go until his desire to reach out to his father had subsided. And when he finally yielded to the overwhelming power of her grip, she loosed his hands and put her arms around him and danced him out the door.
They buried August Schumann in the summer heat. When his wife returned from Karlsbad, refreshed, indeed rejuvenated by the salutary baths, it fell to Robert, having chosen it himself, to tell his mother that her husband was no more. He told her of Bach, away with Buxtehude in Lübeck when his wife, Maria Barbara, had died in Cöthen, and when he had returned she too was buried in the earth. He could read his mother’s thoughts: no good-byes, no final embrace, no vision to carry forever of her husband vulnerable upon his back and within his closed eyes the being he saw last, his sacred son come through the door with questions on his lips. Though he held his mother in his arms, he felt he was now, and would be forever, alone. Even Emilie had fled, aware that her own death had hastened her f
ather’s and aware more than any of them except perhaps Robert that death was, of all the curses visited upon man, the most malign.
*Thus having lived longer, as it would have grieved him to know, than would any of his six children.
**Eventually completed by others and published in eighteen volumes in 1833.
*The premiere of Der Freischütz in Berlin five years before—a key moment in the substantiation of romanticism, a signal victory over the newly appointed musical director to the court of Berlin, the spidery Spontini—had been attended by three of Robert’s greatest influences, though they did not sit together: Heinrich Heine, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Felix Mendelssohn.
Leipzig
MARCH 31, 1828
Whenever I tried to sing of love, it turned to pain. And
when I tried to sing of pain, it turned to love.
Franz Schubert
They arrived late at the home of the Caruses. Clara stood in the doorway between her father and her stepmother-to-be, Clementine Fechner, who was half her father’s age and pretty and could no more carry a tune than she could a cannon. Clara recognized the parquet floor of the foyer and the red Persian runner that led to the steps that led to the hall that led down a vista of enfiladed drawing rooms, from the last of which, with its delicately mullioned windows, issued, as it always did during a Carus soirée, music.
Her father took her regularly to the Caruses’, as he did to the homes of many of Leipzig’s educated, musical, wealthy families, who were (often) good customers for his pianos, whose children were (occasionally) adequate candidates for his lessons, and whose tongues were (inevitably) good catapults from which to launch her career as a pianist.
She came here, and to the others’, not as a sweet little girl for whom there might be no nanny to tend in her parent’s absence but as a performer, expected sooner or later to sit at the piano and play something better than anyone might imagine from observing her frail figure and wide eyes and reluctant speech. That was as it should be. Heaven forbid they might expect her to play better than she looked as if she might. What she loved, almost as much as the playing itself, was the shock of her playing. She loved how the first few notes reduced the jabbering to silence and how the next few notes interrupted the silence with an audible, universal intake of breath and then a sibilant, surprised whispering that was hushed only by a sharp “shhhh,” always the product, and always right on delighted cue, of her father’s munificently satisfied lips.
Even before she arrived at the drawing room, rushing ahead so as not to be identified with Clementine, and lured by the prospect of performing, she recognized both the song—Schubert’s “Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel”—and the voice of the singer. It was her hostess, Frau Agnes Carus, who was scarcely older than Clementine but already a wife, a mother, quite a good singer and pianist (if not as good as I, thought Clara), and the only truly beautiful woman the sight of whom made Clara feel beautiful herself, rather than the opposite.
It was because of Agnes—and not the imposing Graf piano or the delectable wrapped sweets or Agnes’s charming, fat baby who was allowed to crawl among the guests—that Clara preferred a Carus soirée to any other. Agnes was who Clara would like to be—her beauty, her grace, the charming whimsy of her irrepressible speech, the bosom that always seemed but an inhalation away from unbridled revelation—provided she could continue to play the piano as she did and not as Agnes did.
But it was not Agnes accompanying herself on the piano now. Clara could hear as much before she saw what she saw. This was a far more adventuresome pianist. As Gretchen sits with her wheel spinning and her head spinning, the former with cloth and the latter with covetous images of the very flesh and touch of the man who has taken her innocence, the pianist, like a lover, virtually infiltrates her song. He wraps his notes around her words and enfolds her thoughts within his music, which wanders key to key in endless speculation like the girl herself, who wonders if her lover will return, embracing death if he will not. The piano spins the agony of her desire.
This pianist seemed desire itself. He did not play cleanly, but to say there was passion in his execution would be to degrade even that cliché. The voice of the piano lurked beneath the voice of the singer, opening her words with its iniquitous tongue. Agnes Carus seemed inspired by this violation. Clara wanted to protect Agnes and herself.
She stepped into the drawing room and saw she had been right. It was a man, though he seemed more a boy, a big boy; but at least it was not another little girl, imported like some caviar to twiddle the gathered guests. His dark hair was thick and long and wild. She could see the engines of his shoulders grinding through the tight cloth of his fitted coat. Agnes’s hand rested lightly on that muscle, her golden wedding band bobbing like a thing adrift.
Clara couldn’t see his face, but she imagined it on fire, not simply from Agnes’s untoward touch but from the smoke that rose and swept back along his hair. She made her way around the room to see it, behind the guests, who ate and drank and listened but seemed not to see what she saw or even hear what she heard.
Now she faced them both across the body of the piano. The smoke was from his cigar, if not from his wicked smile, which made the cigar swell upward from his lips and his blue eyes dance. He didn’t need the music written out. He looked at nothing but his singer’s face, which looked at him conspiratorially, the two of them against the song and all within the room and poor Dr. Carus himself, who would end up like Clara’s own father if he weren’t careful, his wife run off, the mother of his child, and he in search of someone new but someone who could never match the one he lost. This boy loved his Gretchen. But it seemed to be she who was seducing him. It was wrong, enviably wrong. Agnes was hers. Yet if Agnes won this boy, would he then belong to Clara too or would she belong to neither one of them?
The song ended. Agnes’s hand remained on his shoulder but pressed into it more deeply as she leaned to take first one and then a second glass of champagne from a passing servant’s tray. Hers she put on the piano. His she put into his hand. Clara pressed against the end of the piano to watch them, as if she might put herself between their faces, which came closer now as they touched their glasses and began to drink, Agnes having taken his cigar between her fingers, which became wet from his lips. But Clara was, she knew, invisible to them. She felt as she had when she could not hear—disconnected from some bond that lashed humans one to the other.
He drank down his champagne in a single series of swallows, which Clara could see squeezed through the muscles of his neck. Agnes merely sipped, made demure, it appeared, through admiration of this young man’s utter passion for everything he did.
Clara reached behind her to a small table and took from it a half-finished glass of the same wine. She didn’t care who had drunk from it. You couldn’t get cholera from the rim of a glass. She wished it was his.
“Clärchen, have you lost your mind?”
Her father, from behind, removed the glass from her hand.
“Never drink before you play,” he said and smiled at his joke, which softened her disappointment at being forbidden to drink at all.
Her father now looked at the boy at the piano. “Who is that?” he asked.
“Who knows,” answered Clementine, before she realized from the impatient look on Friedrich’s face that he had asked the question not of her.
Clara shook her head at her father, disguising from him whether it was in answer to his question or in disapproval over how he treated his fiancée, whom Clara felt it was her job to criticize. She didn’t need another mother, but less did she need an unhappy marriage in the midst of which to live and to play music, the latter in particular, since she was not one of these fashionable souls who believed that art was improved by suffering.
“He plays the piano…atrociously,” said her father, “but—”
“Passionately,” Clara interrupted.
“I was going to say ‘brilliantly,’” said her father.
“Atrociously
and brilliantly both?”
“I was referring to his tone,” he said. “Harsh.”
“Perhaps it’s his behavior that’s harsh.”
“You haven’t even met him,” he said. “What can be so harsh about his behavior?”
“It looks quite tender to me,” said Clementine, which drew back to her the attention of her betrothed, who did not seem at all pleased to discover her quite wholly engrossed in the continued display of affection between Agnes Carus and her young pianist.
“Who is he?” Wieck asked again. This time neither of his ladies ventured a guess.
At that moment Agnes noticed them gathered at her piano and quite unashamedly gestured that they come around to join her. Clara was disappointed to see that Agnes’s beautiful green eyes had sought out her father’s and not her own, a feeling only somewhat mitigated by the fact that the blue eyes of the pianist settled within her own. Poor Clementine. Clara saw her quite deliberately take the arm of her intended as they walked from behind the piano toward their hostess.
Agnes had turned her attention back to the pianist, who had reciprocated in kind, so that by the time the trio reached them, the two were once again engrossed in the most obvious flirtation, she still sipping her champagne and he seeming to watch every bubble as it danced and died upon her bottom lip.
Agnes spoke to the boy: “Allow me to introduce Herr Friedrich Wieck, his bride-to-be, Fräulein Clementine Fechner, and his brilliant daughter, Clara. And this, my good friends, is”—she took the young man’s arm so enthusiastically that her breasts came in intimate contact with one another—“my good friend also, Herr Robert Schumann, though I call him Fridolin.”
“Ah, Schiller,” said Wieck, clearly delighted to have caught the reference from the work of another Friedrich, who until the time of his death some twenty years before had been Goethe’s sole rival as a playwright.
