by J. D. Landis
But even that could not more have impressed the audience, which greeted the end of the “Witches’ Dance” with an applause that would have been of greater suitability to a witnessing of the resurrection of the body of our Lord.
Paganini bowed. It was not a gracious bow, such as her father had taught her, a humble bow, and it did not appear directed to the audience so much as to his violin or to his own hands or to himself. He bowed the way she imagined a man with tight pants would upon lowering himself onto a chamber pot.
The audience might have applauded forever had it not been relieved of this effort by the arrival on the stage of a tiny, beautiful boy with golden hair who carried with him a properly stringed violin and exchanged it for the one Paganini had mutilated.
As he received the new violin from the small hands of the boy, Paganini smiled at him, smiled in such a way that Clara felt she had never been smiled at in her life, not by her father or her mothers or her brothers or by Herr Schumann himself, whose smile she most wanted to provoke. She envied that smile, and the man who was so at ease with his place in the world to be able to smile it, and the boy, whoever he might be, however lowly a servant or princely a prince, who was its recipient.
It was as if the boy had brought not only a violin but the beauty of music itself. For when Paganini played upon it, he played a rondo by Beethoven, and he played it with such feeling and with such control and with such knowledge of the music that Clara found herself weeping. From then until the end of the concert—despite Paganini’s seeming inability to refrain from such tricks as dual-hand pizzicato and ricochet bowing and octave trills and double stops and the production of shimmering flageolet tones and what Clara could have sworn sounded like scordatura tuning, to say nothing of his getting his violin to bray and hoot and yelp like various animals and finally at the end of his encores to pronounce in what sounded like perfect Italian “buona sera,” which of course had nearly everyone in the audience shouting back, “buona sera”—she had tears in her eyes. What he did, it seemed impossible to do: And that is why her tears were both of wonder and of anger.
She slept that night with the image of him in her mind. She was to play for him the next morning, and if she lost any sleep, it was the consequence not of nervousness but of enthusiasm. She felt his equal, not in style, certainly, but in value. He had taught her something, he had even inspired her. But she would teach him something, too. She would inspire him, too. At the very least, she would dazzle him.
It was only when she and her father were shown into Paganini’s sitting room at the Hôtel de Pologne that she became concerned. At the center of the room was a piano, and it was a miserable specimen: old and scarred and lopsided and dirty-keyed. Her father went over to it and shook his head and actually pinched his nostrils together with his thumb and forefinger while scrutinizing its innards.
At that moment, Paganini’s servant opened wide a double door at the rear of the sitting room, and there appeared Paganini himself, coming out of what was clearly his bedroom, which Clara was pleased to observe was disastrously untidy, with clothes and peculiarly high, narrow shoes thrown everywhere and, most shocking of all, piles…heaps…nearly mountains of stuffed animals, whose brilliant colors contrasted peculiarly with the blackness of the clothes and shoes and whose very presence in Paganini’s bedroom made Clara feel much better about the wretched piano on which she was supposed to impress Signor Paganini so he would utter such words as would please her father insofar as they could be used to spread her fame.
Paganini was wearing a gigantic fur coat, which Clara thought might be appropriate in the chilly autumn air outside but was hardly necessary here. The room was not warm—there was so much energy expended in the concentration upon the playing of most instruments that musicians customarily preferred cool dwellings—but neither did it call for the donning of the piliferous epidermises of whatever herd of animals had been fashioned into Paganini’s garment.
But the coat did, at least, make Paganini seem less cadaverous. He appeared, in fact, almost jollily roly-poly. And that, like his stuffed animals, helped to put her at ease.
From beneath the huge coat peeked out those same strange shoes she had glimpsed in his bedroom and the left one of which she now remembered beating time like a meat cleaver upon the floor of the stage as Paganini had played his violin. The shoes had a high heel for something a man would wear and such pointed toes that Clara thought the end of Paganini’s feet must resemble nothing so much as his own nose.
He did not come over to shake hands with her father and to do whatever he might have done to greet her. Instead, he sat immediately down in the room’s one large chair and sighed the way a fat man does when he sits. He folded his arms over the large belly that his coat created for him out of its countless pelts, then motioned for her father to sit down in a small chair farthest from the piano and with the least good view of it and for her to sit down at the piano.
She was about to announce the piece she would play when Paganini spoke his first words: “Please forgive the deplorable condition of the piano, young lady. Would one could use a scordatura tuning as easily on a piano as I do to cheat on the violin. It was abandoned here by a student who was either destitute or deaf, let us hope the former. You will have to be a far greater musician than I to get even a single note out of it.”
Her heart leapt and stilled within the same moment. “Polonaise in E-flat,” she announced softly and perched her hands over the keys.
Before she could lower them, Paganini asked, “Whose polonaise?”
“Mine,” answered Clara, and played.
It was no more difficult than playing for her father at home; easier, in fact, because of how Paganini had made her father sit with as poor a view as he might have of her hands from anywhere in this bare, cavernous room. Paganini seemed to have known that she would not now, or ever, have as severe a critic as her own father, for whom her playing was an expression not merely of her own life but of his as well. Because Paganini had seated himself so much closer to her than he had her father, he had contrived to make her feel she were playing for him alone. This conspiracy between them more than overcame the fact that the piano sounded even worse than it looked. It was terribly out of key, and she wished only that she could have done with it what Paganini had done with his violin during his concert when he tuned up his A string by a semitone.
When she finished, she could not help looking first at her father, however, who she was shocked to see was looking not at her but at Paganini, as if he did not want to disagree with any judgment the maestro might make, not even when it came to his own daughter.
As for Paganini, he said, “Well, what did you think?” addressing that strange question at neither Clara nor her father but, she concluded, his own fur coat. She glanced over at her father, who had the stricken but halfway angry look he got when he was forced to deal with a madman (a not uncommon occurrence when one made a living in the field of music).
But then, of all things, the fur coat answered. “It was wonderful!” it said in a high, tiny voice with what Clara assumed must be an Italian accent.
Was it possible that Paganini possessed, aside from his phenomenal musical skills, the ability to throw his voice like those men with puppets who often appeared on programs with musicians?
That question in Clara’s mind was answered negatively, but more shockingly than had it been answered in the affirmative, when out of the front of Paganini’s fur coat popped the head of the golden-haired little boy who had carried Paganini’s fully strung violin to him on the stage during his concert.
“Allow me to introduce my son, Achilles.” Paganini unbuttoned his coat fully, revealing that he was wearing nothing beneath it but long flannel underwear, and kissed the boy several times as he emerged and placed himself on his father’s lap and pulled his father’s arms tightly about him. “He’s my own worst critic, and so I thought he should be yours, mademoiselle. Please forgive the subterfuge. I don’t know about you in your pe
rformances, but for me it is always most intimidating to play for children. Like dogs, they hear things the rest of us cannot. And like dogs, they do not hesitate to howl if what they hear does not please them. And you did not howl, did you, little man?”
“No, I did not, Papa.”
“She plays wonderfully, does she not?”
“I said that already.”
Paganini laughed and tightened his arms around his son. “So you did. So you did. And on that perfectly atrocious piano.”
“Atrocious,” repeated Achilles, who might be trying the word for the first time.
“Wonderful tone,” said Paganini. “Would you not agree?”
“Good technique,” said Achilles.
“He gets that from me,” explained Paganini. “The concentration on technique.”
“Out of tune,” said Achilles.
“The piano,” said Paganini.
“You’re out of tune sometimes,” his son clarified.
“Of course I’m out of tune sometimes. I’m a violinist. But we never speak of a pianist as being out of tune. Only a piano.”
“Or you,” said Achilles.
“Or me,” said Paganini, smiling with the proud paternal smile that invites all those present to replicate it. Clara had always been embarrassed when her father did the same, but she was touched to observe it in Paganini, whom she could not have imagined as a father and now could not imagine otherwise.
“I know,” he said to Achilles, “that you could not see Mademoiselle Wieck because you were hiding in my coat, but if—”
“You made me hide.”
Paganini kissed the top of the boy’s head, which Clara was sure other people aside from herself must be tempted to do. “That’s true. I made you hide. But that’s not my point. My point is only that you could not see Mademoiselle Wieck play, you could only hear her, and if you could have seen her you would most likely have told her that she has such a genuine sense of the beauty of music that she ought not to play so restlessly and with so much movement of the body.”
“Ah, thank you, thank you,” said Clara’s father, as if he’d been paying for a lesson and wanted to get his money’s worth.
“No,” said Achilles to his father.
“No, what?”
“No, I would not have said that.”
“Why not?”
“Because I would not say anything bad.”
Paganini looked at his son with an exaggerated expression of shock. “But you do sometimes howl when you hear music played badly.”
The boy put his head back against his father’s thin chest and smiled the huge smile of a fat-faced angel and tried unsuccessfully to contain his laughter: “Like a dog.”
Paganini invited Clara and her father to the remainder of his Leipzig concerts, where they sat on the stage as his special guests. Her father in turn arranged for a new piano to be delivered to Paganini’s rooms at the Hôtel de Pologne, to which he invited them in order to ordain the instrument. This they did with a four-hand arrangement of a rondo on themes from Paganini himself, which brought him to tears and Achilles, witnessing his father’s joy, to the same.
He told Clara she would be famous one day and must beware of fame’s blandishments. “I refer not to money,” he said, “for money is the least to be given to a person who can make other people pay for the privilege of hearing him create nothing more substantial or permanent than sound. I refer to those things that have nothing to do with music. There are Paganini canes and Paganini frocks and Paganini umbrellas shaped like violins and Paganini gloves, a pair of which I was offered myself in Paris, which led me to ask the saleswoman if she didn’t by chance have a pair made from the leather of another animal. We musicians are not animals, mademoiselle, but we are not exactly human either, are we?”
Clara loved being spoken to like a fellow musician, worldly and accomplished. But she loved even more leaving Paganini and her father to talk about her while she went into the bedroom with Achilles and the two of them played with his stuffed animals.
On the day Paganini took Achilles and left Leipzig, she brought the boy two bunches of grapes, one white and one red, and Paganini asked for her journal and wrote in it some notes from one of his scherzos and a harmonization of the chromatic scale in contrary motion and signed it with his name to “al merito singulare di Madamigella Clara Wieck.”
Leipzig
SEPTEMBER 19, 1830
People find her very lovable.
Friedrich Wieck
Robert had barely turned twenty when Friedrich Wieck accepted him as a resident piano pupil in his home at Grimmaischestrasse Number 36.
Wieck wrote to Robert’s mother, who remained not at all convinced that her son should be abandoning his legal studies: “I shall turn your son Robert into one of the finest pianists now living. He will play with greater feeling than Moscheles and finer technique than Hummel. As proof of this I offer you my eleven-year-old daughter, Clara, whom I am now beginning to present to the world.”
Wieck had no intention of offering Clara to Robert—this was hardly his purpose in inviting Robert to live with him and his family. It was traditional for students of music to live with their teachers. Music was not something like cooking or equestrianism. It did not inhabit a particular time or place so much as it inhabited the beings of those who became its votaries. You might remove your hands from the piano, as you might your legs from the horse between them, but you could not remove the music from yourself or yourself from the music. There was no escape. You might as well, said Wieck, live with it, and thus with me.
“I want to have a house like Bach’s,” he explained. “I have a mere four children thus far, of course—you’ve met only the best of them, Clara, the others being boys, God help them—but Bach had what?—two dozen? three? Yet he had his students live in his house. They were with him all day long. Not studying the whole time, God forbid, but playing, yes, and tuning the instruments and repairing them if need be and tediously copying music and listening, listening, listening. Can you imagine, Robert? Bach himself once played through the whole of The Well-Tempered Clavier three times for Nikolaus Gerber, three times in succession, without so much as tugging his cuffs or taking a coffee. Gerber said afterward that he had learned more in those hours, which passed like mere moments, than he had in all the years of his life. Bach then told Gerber he must begin his studies not with these forty-eight preludes and fugues but with four months of finger exercises. And so it must be with you.”
“But you are not Bach,” said Robert.
“And you are not Clara,” said Wieck.
Robert sometimes, in his Hoffmann-inspired love for nicknames and pseudonyms, called her Zilia, actually a nickname within a nickname, for Zilia was itself Robert’s playful name for Cecilia, the patron saint of music.
She called him Herr Chumann, slightly mispronouncing his name not on purpose but because she had, in beginning to speak so relatively late in life, developed a bit of a speech impediment. Naturally, he found it appealing.
He also used with her the formal Sie, not, as he did with her brothers Alwin, Gustav, and half-brother, Clemens, the familiar du. This was not because he felt particularly formal with her—how could he be, when she was so spirited and playful and, in his presence if not her father’s, wild? He wrote in his diary, “What a creature Clara is! Barely three hours old, her heart is evolved in a way that disturbs me. Moods and fits, crying and laughing, withdrawn then exuberant. Her father ought well be in bliss at having Zilia.”
No, the formality of the pronoun with which he addressed her was occasioned by the respect he held for her musicianship. They were, after all, students together. But while she was merely a child and he was, he liked to think, a man of at least part of the world, she was so much more at ease with the piano than he, and so much more accomplished at it, that he sometimes felt he was in the presence of his master.
She intimidated him, though she inspired him as well. He practiced between six and seven ho
urs a day, perpetually disoriented by Wieck’s demands for both technique and beauty. Wieck accused him of believing that the entirety of piano playing consisted in pure technique and used Clara to show him what he called “a pure, precise, smooth, clear, elegant touch.” But when Robert attempted to let the piano sing, as Clara did, Wieck pushed him to study dry, cold theory. Robert was willing to acknowledge that he lacked much more than a rudimentary knowledge of thoroughbass and counterpoint, but he rebelled against what he considered the rigid and abstract recapitulation of mere musical principles and refused to study theory and composition with Christian Weinlich, the St. Thomas’s Church cantor to whom Clara went diligently without a single complaint and from whom she returned with ever greater fluency. He threatened to run off to Weimar and enroll with Johann Hummel, who after all, Robert told Wieck, had himself been a student of both Mozart and Clementi. “With all due respect to Mozart and Clementi,” said Wieck, “I am the better teacher.”
Wieck nicknamed Robert “the hothead,” and in retaliation Robert refused to practice even his finger exercises. But he still played the piano for six or seven hours a day, as many of them for Clara as her crowded schedule allowed.
