Longing

by J. D. Landis

  “It is only through beauty that man makes his way to freedom,” Robert quoted with no acknowledgment to Schiller but more than enough to Agnes, to whose beauty he most obviously referred in what was clearly his attempt to flatter his way toward some as-yet-undeclared compass of freedom with its fleshly divulgence.

  “Who is Fridolin?” asked Clementine.

  Agnes looked at her gravely and answered, “Fridolin was a young page so utterly devoted to his mistress that she gave herself to him”—here Agnes broke into the most seductive laughter—“that is to say, she gave her heart to him. As I have mine to Robert.” She laid her head upon Robert Schumann’s shoulder, which looked both powerful and inviting in the snug sleeve of his coat.

  Herr Schumann blushed and to cover his embarrassment drank from the glass of champagne on the piano.

  “You see,” said Agnes, “we even drink from the same glass.”

  Herr Schumann realized what he had done and, putting down the glass, blushed even more.

  “What brings you to Leipzig, Herr Schumann?” asked Wieck, though Clara knew it was not the question foremost in her father’s mind.

  “I am a lowly studiosus juris,” he answered, in a voice both shy and charming. “I have been here but two days. I enrolled at the law school and the next thing I did was to look up my old friends the Caruses in their Leipzig abode.”

  Law school! Clara thought he looked like a gymnasium student.

  Agnes shook her head. “Law school! You have as much reason to be at law school as I have to be in a convent. It’s his mother’s doing,” she explained, before addressing herself once again to her young page. “You may go to law school from now until you’re eighty—by which time you will still not have passed your exams, I am sure—and you will remain a musician and not a lawyer. Fridolin and I have been singing and playing together for over a year now. He writes songs for me, you know. One of them was based on Ernst Schultze’s ‘Transformation,’ the title of which speaks for itself, does it not, Fridolin? And another is to his own lovely poem, ‘Light as Quivering Sylphs,’ which describes both myself in his presence and the very trembling called for in the voice of the soprano. What you were just listening to, however, was by Schubert, not Schumann. You are familiar with Schubert, I am sure?”

  “Of course,” said Wieck.

  Clara nodded.

  Clementine also nodded, though unconvincingly.

  “So it was music that brought you together?” asked Wieck, closing in on his prey.

  “Not music,” said Herr Schumann.

  “No?” questioned Wieck.

  “Illness,” said Herr Schumann.

  “Robert is a patient of my husband.”

  Her husband knew this man! Clara would have thought the two of them would go to any length to avoid her husband. She would have thought Agnes would deny being married (though she had let her wedding ring bob on her young man’s back, where Clara was sure he could feel it through his coat and shirt). Poor Dr. Carus. He must be going through what her father had gone through. But her mother had never behaved like this. Her mother had shown her smile of joy in the presence of her lover only to her daughter, and even then she had always tried to hide it with her hands before her face.

  “But you look so…robust,” Clementine said to Herr Schumann.

  “Madness,” he responded.

  “I beg your pardon.” Clementine was immediately flustered. “How dare you…I meant only…Forgive me if…”

  “No no no no no.” Herr Schumann reached out his hand toward Clementine, only to have it grasped, though not withdrawn, by Agnes. “I didn’t mean you are mad. I meant I went to see Dr. Carus for madness. Mine, Fräulein Fechner.”

  Agnes now took Herr Schumann’s hand as far out of the vicinity of Clementine as possible, by pressing it to the chaste but ravishing landscape of freckle and shadow that lay naked between her throat and her bosom.

  “My Fridolin isn’t really mad,” she said, though it was quite clear to Clara that if he was, it was Agnes who was making him so. “Not mad, but disturbed perhaps.”

  “What are your symptoms?” asked Clementine.

  “Insomnia,” he answered. “Dreams. Night sweats.”

  “Oh, my!” responded Clementine, who appeared unprepared for such specifics. Her eyes went in search of a new glass of champagne but found instead the far-less-bubbly countenance of her husband-to-be, who was concerned, Clara knew, that his fiancée’s prying would deprive him of a potential paying, and in this case potentially brilliant, customer.

  “Well, you’d have them too,” said Herr Schumann, clearly trying to thaw poor Fräulein Fechner from the icy gaze of her paramour, “if you were to stay even one night with the Caruses in their castle in Colditz.”*

  It was all Clara could do to keep from shaking her head. Dr. Carus not only treated his wife’s lover but invited him to stay—to sleep!—in one of their homes. Such intrigues made her wish to grow up as quickly as possible, not so she might emulate such behavior, she told herself, but that she might understand it. In the meantime, it was disturbingly enjoyable simply to observe it.

  “Oh, castle,” sighed Clementine.

  “It’s not what you might expect,” countered Herr Schumann.

  “Don’t you make fun of our castle,” chided Agnes, clearly inviting him to do so.

  “How old is it?” asked Clementine. “I love old castles.”

  “Not so old,” he said. He looked to Agnes for corroboration: “Perhaps four hundred years?”

  She kissed his hand. “Precisely.”

  “And do you live in it all alone?” Clementine asked Agnes.

  “Well, there’s my husband and our baby.”

  Herr Schumann laughed.

  “Do you live there too?” Clementine’s desire for gossip seemed to have overcome her sense of propriety.

  “Oh, not I. I lived in Zwickau until two days ago. Now I live here in Leipzig. But four hundred others do live in the Caruses’ castle.”

  “Four hundred!” Clementine was aghast.

  “Precisely.” It was Herr Schumann who said it this time, though this did not keep Agnes from kissing his hand once again.

  “Four hundred servants?”

  “Not servants,” answered Herr Schumann. “In——”

  “Robert,” cautioned Agnes, putting a finger to his lips.

  “Inmates.” Herr Schumann at once pronounced the word and kissed his mistress’s finger.

  “Inmates!” For Clementine this seemed to have gone beyond gossip into the repellent. “You live in a prison?”

  “Asylum,” answered Herr Schumann. “Dr. Carus is the medical director.”

  “We call them patients,” said Agnes.

  They are inmates,” said Herr Schumann forcefully, in a way that made him seem no longer quite such a boy. “It’s not the Caruses’ fault, but these ‘patients’ live in filth and squalor. They don’t bathe in a month and, while they are not beaten, they are punished by being told that their suffering is itself a punishment for some defect in their souls. The soul! I believe in the soul as much as the next man…and I don’t believe in the next man at all.”

  Clara laughed. No one else did.

  “Thank you,” Herr Schumann said to her. “At least somebody here has a sense of humor.”

  “I have a sense of humor,” said Clementine.

  “May the Lord spare us,” said her husband-to-be.

  “So you must picture it,” continued Herr Schumann. “Frau Carus and her husband live surrounded by four hundred madmen—and soon to be many more, because the Sonnenstein asylum at Maxen is going to be transferring those it releases right to the castle in Colditz instead of to prison, as they have done heretofore. This is evidence to the American doctor Pliny Earle of the rising of the morning sun of a new day in the treatment of insanity in Germany—sending people to Colditz instead of to prison!”

  “You seem to know a great deal about this,” said Clementine. “I should think you wo
uld be in doctor school and not lawyer school.”

  “It’s because I am frightened, Fräulein Fechner.”

  “Of medical school?” she asked.

  “Of madness,” responded Herr Schumann.

  “Oh, you don’t seem mad to me,” said Clementine.

  “How would you know?” Clara’s father apparently couldn’t resist asking.

  To Clara’s relief, her stepmother-to-be smiled sweetly at her future husband and said, “Why, thank you, Friedrich.”

  Clara’s father must have decided that the time was right to change the subject to music; specifically, to music lessons.

  “You play the piano well,” he said to Herr Schumann. “You are, I assume, self-taught?”

  “No.” Herr Schumann looked around for something. When he couldn’t find it, he put his fingers to his lips and seemed to begin blowing kisses at Agnes. Clara wondered if Agnes would respond in kind until Agnes reached over to the edge of the piano and produced for her lover what was left of his cigar, which he put hungrily between his lips and upon which he began to suck, and upon which he continued to suck though the cigar was clearly extinguished and nothing was produced from its end but a few airborne flakes of dry gray ash.

  Herr Schumann seemed quite content to smoke in this fashion, rather than talk, when Clara’s father, as she had guessed he would, pushed stubbornly on. “Are you saying, Herr Schumann, that you do not play the piano well or that you are not self-taught?”

  “Yes,” he answered.

  Her father had the sense not to ask which but to say simply, “Would you like me to teach you?”

  “What a splendid idea,” said Agnes.

  “Why?” asked Herr Schumann.

  Her father was confused. “I’m sorry. To which one of us are you speaking?”

  “Neither,” answered Herr Schumann.

  “You really are quite mad,” said Clementine.

  “If I am, it’s not because I ask the question ‘Why?’”

  “Are you asking it of the universe?” asked Clara’s father.

  “Now that would be mad!” Herr Schumann looked right at Clara and said, “I ask it of you—why have you not said a word?”

  “She is not comfortable speaking,” her father said.

  “Is anyone?” asked Herr Schumann.

  Is anyone? What a splendid question. Clara felt she spoke constantly. But rarely within hearing.

  “Most people never stop talking,” said Clementine.

  “Exactly!” exclaimed Herr Schumann, who added, “That’s the first intelligent thing you’ve said this evening.”

  “Thank you.” Clementine actually appeared to curtsy.

  “So you like Schubert?” asked Clara’s father, as if to take attention from both his girls.

  “Oh, yes.”

  “And Goethe?”

  “Of course. But you know that Goethe does not like the songs Schubert has written to his verse. Or Beethoven. He prefers Zelter’s settings.”

  Her father ignored that embarrassing information and said, “I am planning to take Clara to play for Goethe.”

  “How old are you?” Herr Schumann asked her.

  “She is eight years old.”

  “Too late,” said Herr Schumann sarcastically.

  “What do you mean, ‘too late’?” boomed her father, who did not like anyone to question anything having to do with his teaching her.

  “Goethe saw Mozart when Mozart was seven,” said Herr Schumann.

  “Mozart!” said her father, leaving it unclear whether he meant to deify or demean his example.

  “Goethe explained Mozart’s genius by saying that music must be instinctive, innate. He said it requires almost nothing from the world, from experience, from life. So much for teaching,” added Herr Schumann.

  “I am the greatest teacher in the world, and Clara will become the world’s greatest pianist! And when she does, it will be because of my teaching!”

  Poor Herr Schumann. He had touched upon the one subject, along with money, that made her father grow loud and swollen and quite mad himself.

  Clara saw Agnes catch her eye and start to gesture that she should sit down at the piano when Herr Schumann, apparently unmoved by her father’s outburst, said, “I’m glad you liked the song we played. It was, you know, one of the first songs Schubert wrote. He wrote it for a girl named Theresa Grob. Her voice was as pretty as she was homely, for she was said to be one of the ugliest girls in Vienna. Her face was pitted and she was as wide as a cow. But he loved her more than he’d loved anyone else. So he asked her to marry him.”

  With that, Herr Schumann stopped talking and started to suck once more on his dry, dead cigar. He looked into her eyes again with his blue eyes. She knew what he wanted. She knew why he had stopped telling his story at its moment of greatest suspense. He wanted to hear her voice.

  “For God’s sake, how did Theresa reply?”

  Clementine had spoken for her, in her vulgar way.

  Herr Schumann answered without looking away from Clara. “She said she would marry him. His heart took flight. But he had no prospects—he was only a poor composer, only a genius whose work would therefore be appreciated by only a few, among whom I include ourselves. And so her family would not let her marry him and arranged for her to marry a rich baker, who has seen to it that she is now as wide as two cows. Yet Schubert loves her to this day, fifteen years since he saw her last.”

  “Is that a true story?” asked Clementine.

  “As true as I can make it,” answered Herr Schumann.

  “How old were they—Schubert and Theresa?” Clementine pushed on.

  “Seventeen.”

  “My Fridolin is seventeen.” Agnes pushed her fingers into his hair.

  Not even twice her own age, Clara figured. In ten years, he would be but a third older than she. In fifty years, no one would be able to tell them apart.

  “If I can’t hear you talk, I might as well hear you play,” Herr Schumann said to her. “Play for us, Clara. Let us see just how good a teacher your father is.”

  “What a good idea!” said Agnes, leading Robert away by the arm.

  “Clara,” she whispered, saying her name to herself as he had said it to her, and to himself and to anyone who would listen, for the first time.

  *To become in due course a prisoner of war camp.

  Leipzig

  DECEMBER 28, 1828

  The state should keep me. I have come into the world

  for no purpose but to compose.

  Franz Schubert

  When news of Schubert’s death reached Leipzig, he had been dead for one month, ten days. This delay was occasioned not by a paucity of technology capable of transmitting such news with greater speed—my God, a man might have walked on his hands from Vienna to Leipzig in that time!—but because such news was not, in essence, news at all. Robert would have been as likely to have been informed of the death of a Viennese pastry filler as of Schubert’s. Schubert was just another impecunious artist (genius!) barely out of his twenties whose death was announced with the taciturnity reserved for the unknown and the unmourned.

  Robert was living on Am Brühl* with Emil Flechsig, whom he’d followed from Zwickau to Leipzig University. Among its three courses of study—law, medicine, and theology—Robert had chosen the first, not because he was particularly interested in the law but because medicine would leave him no time for music or girls and theology was the refuge in Leipzig as everywhere else for the ambitious poor. It had been thus for poor Friedrich Hölderlin, who had been forced by his poverty to seek his education at the seminary in Tübingen, where he wrote in praise of revolution rather than of God, and then as tutor to a banker’s children fell in love with the banker’s wife, Susette, who became the Diotima of his great poems and the cause—more because she loved him in return than if she had not loved him at all—of the madness into which he had fallen five years before Robert was born. Every time he read Hölderlin’s work—such inspiring words as, �
��He who steps upon his misery stands higher”—Robert could not help but think about the man who wrote them, who was at that very moment living outside his own mind, or so deeply within it that there was no difference.

  What if this were to happen to him? What if Agnes loved him as he loved her and her husband sent him away, and Robert went mad and were locked up forever in a madhouse?

  All because he’d gone to law school.

  At least he didn’t have to live at the school, as Hölderlin had been forced to live at the seminary. But he was no longer happy living with Emil. Emil had been the sort of hometown boy who, when he goes off to the big city, seems in one’s mind to acquire all the virtues of the big city: worldliness, geniality, savoir vivre, profligacy, voluptuousness, and a superior haircut. But Emil in reality was no better-looking than he’d been in Zwickau and was as uncouth in his Bavarian temperament as he was pedantic, a strange combination that rendered him simultaneously crude and fussy.

  Robert no longer loved Emil, which made living with him something of a nightmare, particularly since there were others he did love.

  One of them was Gisbert Rosen, a Jew who had left him and transferred from Leipzig’s law school to Heidelberg’s because in the university at Leipzig the burgeoning of the Burschenschäften was threatening Gisbert both bodily and spiritually. The Burschenschäften were fraternities organized around principles of bumptious nationalism that had come to encompass a distaste for, if not yet an utter disgorging of, Jews, and held together by a celebration of the male body that had everything to do with its aggressiveness and nothing to do with its beauty. The Burschenschäften boys had betrayed one of their own heroes from the century before, Johann Winckelmann, who had loved the male form (equally in marble and in flesh) but had no idea it would end up being promoted as the German version of a living, breathing weapon, as physically perfect as it was morally corrupt.*

  Robert missed Gisbert terribly. Immediately before Gisbert had settled in Heidelberg, the two of them had shared their love for Jean Paul by going off on vacation to Beyreuth to visit Jean Paul’s grave. From there they made their way to Augsburg, where they stayed with Dr. Heinrich von Kurrer, who had years before lived in Zwickau and been August Schumann’s best friend. The sadness Robert felt at seeing his late father through the eyes of someone who himself had seen the same man when he was not much older than Robert was now (and what man is a more beloved if confounding mystery to his son than his own youthful father?) was immediately transformed into a kind of passionate joy when Dr. Kurrer’s daughter, Clara, appeared. Fortunately for the two boys, if more so for Clara herself, she was betrothed to another. But they left with something of greater value than either her virtue or the loss of their own: a letter of introduction from Dr. Kurrer to Heinrich Heine, in Munich.