by J. D. Landis
We were invited to court, where the Grand Duke sat beside me at the piano and would surely have turned my pages had he known how to read music. The Town Theater, which we had not even been allowed to rent, was now given us without fee, and I played there to five hundred people and must have been asked by at least that many to sign autographs, which as you can see even now has made my usually perfect handwriting almost as bad—note I say “almost”—as yours. So we left Weimar in total triumph, though not before Papa got in a fight with the Privy Counselor, who refused to give Papa letters of introduction because he claimed Papa took my career more seriously than he took Beethoven’s music. But Papa didn’t care. He said with Paganini and Goethe behind us, what did we need Privy Counselor Schmidt for anyway. Besides, here in Kassel, where you should not be worried to hear the cholera has also reached, Ludwig Spohr himself introduced me to the court. There, we were seated at the royal dining table, and Herr Spohr turned my pages and allowed me to introduce him and all of Kassel to the Chopin Variations as well as to my own scherzo (for which I have written Herr Spohr a new coda just to keep him happy and also a little letter much shorter than this one to tell him that I once got a new piano because I had learned all his songs) and wrote for Papa an endorsement saying I have such gifts as “might be found only in the greatest of living artists” and then insisted I stay until the very end of the grand ball, though Papa, with the endorsement in hand (in his pocket, actually, and well buttoned up as you might imagine) kept telling me I need stay no longer and should go to bed, as if he didn’t know as you do how much I love to dance.
Your friend,
Clara Wieck
He apparently didn’t. In a separate letter, in which Wieck told Robert with much less charm and much more tympany of Clara’s various triumphs, he remarked of the grand ball in Kassel that “all such diversions and attentions and invitations to gavotte make no impression on Clara.”
Robert knew. He and Clara had danced together often. He had attempted to teach her the steps he had learned from his sister and his mother (his father had not objected to the idea of dance, only to its practice as what he had called “the greatest temptation there can be, since one can smoke and read at the same time, to a man at his books”) and various forgotten women in various forgotten taverns on various unforgettable but, alas, forgotten nights. The gavotte, certainly, with the lifting of the feet at which Clara became adept only after he had told her to think of stepping over puddles. And the courante in which the feet glide. And the carmagnole that had them marching around her room singing revolutionary songs. And the allemande, savior of German reputation in the dance, much like the Ländler that his sister danced as he had played for her, except Emilie had danced alone and Robert danced with Clara in his arms, astounded at the smallness of her, boned and edgy, every muscle in her back making an impression on his fingertips, and the strength of her, particularly in her hands, as might be expected, one gripping his hand and the other his shirt as far as she could reach toward the crest of his shoulder.
Her brother Alwin, two years almost to the week younger than she, often played the violin for them to dance to. And he played it well, provided his playing was not measured by his sister’s, which Robert would never have thought to do—you might as well compare a mallard to a thrush. But Wieck had not long prior to their departure made that mistake himself and thrown poor Alwin to the floor and taken his violin away with one hand and pulled the boy’s hair with the other, complaining all the while of how poorly Alwin had been playing. Alwin, like Clara when Wieck forbade her the piano, begged and begged for his instrument back, but his father would not give it to him. Clara sat through all this with a strange smile and finally sat down at the piano and played, a Weber sonata as Robert recalled, trusting she did this to remove the terrible pressure and humiliation being heaped upon her brother and not to shine at Alwin’s expense. As for Wieck, Robert felt he was getting to know him as he would prefer not to know him, a man who ranked his children according to their talents and acted like a Jew with his fervent eye on the cash drawer when there was a chance to stick four groschenstück into his own pocket.
In truth, Robert realized, he had left the Wieck home not simply because his reasons for being there—Wieck, his teacher; Clara, his friend—had departed but also to escape from memories like these. He had felt himself too much like Alwin, in a young pianist’s frail shadow that eclipsed the light of all on whom it fell. Here she was now, in Paris, being compared to the greatest pianists alive, and here she had been, on Grimmaischestrasse in Leipzig, impossible not to compare oneself to.
It was strange, he thought, that his ambition to become a great pianist, as foolish as it might have proven to be, was never so strong as when she had left.
And so he had moved out of her house and into this anonymous room of his own in this anonymous suburb.
His piano was rented, a ducat a month. It might not have been as fine an instrument as Wieck had provided, and he now had to pay for it. But it was at least a piano that he was convinced had been played by no more proficient hands than his own, whereas every piano in the Wieck household had been tainted by Clara’s greater mastery of it and thus, as pianos will, mocked all those of lesser talent who dared lay hands upon it.
He commenced a course of study in composition with Heinrich Dorn, who was the music director of the Leipzig Opera and presumed in his East Prussian way that a musician’s bottomless immersion in counterpoint and thoroughbass would make him a composer. Robert knew, however, that it was in the mystery of the unconsciousness of the imagination that its poetry dwelled; this caused him to subscribe, at what distance was allowed by reticence and reclusion, to the growing belief in Innerlichkeit, which was the nurturing of the interior being, that inner self made manifest within the material world only on the wings of art. And yet, Dorn’s insistence upon the sovereignty of the fugue, together with Friedrich Marpurg’s book of theory, brought Robert finally to the Bach of The Well-Tempered Clavier, whose fugues he dismembered and analyzed down to every separate note and pause, which he felt gave strength not only to his playing and composing but to his entire moral fiber, the presence of Christel in his bed notwithstanding. In the absence of Clara Wieck and the way her music fed his deteriorating sense of who he was, Bach became his daily bread.
He played the piano for ten hours a day. He had never practiced so much before or experienced such sublime agony. His shoulders seemed to be trying to lock themselves atop his head as they rose ever higher with the increased difficulty of what he was learning. His neck became an inflexible spike driven between his clenched jaw and his spine. His back itself became curved as if lashed by some typhoon of music, that forced his head ever closer to the tidy row of headstones upon the graveyard of his instrument. And his fingers…his fingers were in danger of becoming what Weber himself called “those damned piano fingers that through endless practicing become the ignorant and tyrannical enemies of creation.” He bloodied his knuckles and left upon the white keys red smears that never had time to dry before he once again attacked the piano and, through the piano, himself.
But if his fingers were damned—and at least one of them certainly seemed anathematized, at least to the extent that it was now anesthetized—it was not because he had been practicing the kind of work that for Weber and Wieck alike would produce mere brilliance at the expense of the truly musical. The sublimity of this experience for him had been precisely in the music, particularly Bach’s fugues, this one a gavotte, that one a double fugue in the guise of a prelude that nearly obliterates the true fugue that follows, another a stretto fugue in which the second voice takes up the subject before the first has finished speaking it, to produce an intertwining that for all its formality has the casual quality of human interaction, a conversation between himself and Clara, she always bursting with interruption, this late-speaking child so intent upon expressing herself in every conceivable way, or he and Christel in bed, her limbs like music bending over his, the over
lapping of their breath.
He had lost the use of his hand, at least for the purposes of playing the piano in the way the piano must be played if one is to play in and for the public, because he, like Faust, sold his soul to the Devil. The Devil, blessedly, being himself, so that what was loss was also gain. He had destroyed himself as a performer of music so he might become its creator.
It was not Clara alone who had forced him to this monumental decision, though there was no one else to thank. Neither had it exactly been a decision, because he had set out not to ruin his hand but to strengthen it.
Before he’d moved into the Wieck household, he had left Leipzig’s law school and joined Heidelberg’s, to be closer to Gisbert Rosen, primarily, but also to study with Anton Thibaut, who was nearly as famous for his knowledge of music as for his classes in law. Professor Thibaut was the author of On Purity in Musical Art, and it was he who recognized what was pure in Robert, telling him, at the time Robert was required as a Saxon citizen to return to Leipzig University to take his degree, that it was pointless for him to continue the study of law because he had clearly been called not only to music but to the life of music. “The law,” Thibaut told him, “is for those who would comfort suffering; music is for those who find comfort in suffering.” It was only when Robert repeated these words to his mother that she agreed he might use his inheritance from his father’s estate to board and study with Friedrich Wieck and thus abandoned her futile dream that he make a living as one of those who, as she put it, “lives small and earns big.”
While studying law in Heidelberg, and finding like all law students that there was time for little else, Robert discovered himself necessarily torn from the piano itself and thus began carrying with him everywhere a miniature dumb keyboard with very stiff springs attached to the keys. It was on this contraption that he would practice wherever he was—in class, at the tavern, sounding the English he studied with the angelically lisping wife of Ferdinand Ries, at home with Rosen until Karl Semmel had arrived and inspired in Robert what he called a more masculine and firm love than the girlish feelings he had for Gisbert, from whom he split to be with Karl. He would sit in his room with his hands working themselves into stiff exhaustion on the silent keyboard as he stared out the window at the Catholic church on his right and the insane asylum on his left, his mind in doubt whether to turn Catholic or go mad.
Perhaps he had gone mad. It had not been so long since he was in the park at Zweinaundorf reading Jean Paul’s Siebenkäs. He sat enraptured among the trees and actually heard a nightingale. He could scarcely contain his body. His hands and feet were thrashing in the air. He was so happy he wanted to weep. But on the way back into Leipzig, he felt he was losing his mind. He was aware of his mind—of containing it, or of its containing him—but he was also aware of losing it. He may actually have gone mad. If so, it was madness with a purpose, it was madness that had brought him not to despair but to the exaltation he felt now at having been freed from the grip of the piano upon his hands.
Anyone looking at him, with his middle finger sunk to its knuckle in oxshit, might think him mad. Christel surely would, if she ever woke up from the sleep into which she always floated immediately after her crisis, purged of guilt and thus so unlike himself, who could no more fall asleep after his own than he could reclaim his innocence.
Christel had noticed, hanging from the ceiling above his table, the instrument of his torture, which put the dumb keyboard to shame in how it stretched and, finally, tortured the fingers. It was a sling that immobilized his middle finger so that the others on both sides could begin, like children sent off to board at school, to assume their independence.
Christel had climbed up on his chair to get a closer look at it. Smiling and shaking her head, she pulled it down to the extent of its elasticity. “If you want me on the table, fine. But you’ll never fit in this.”
He laughed. “It’s a stretcher, all right, but not for that. It’s for my fingers.”
“Your fingers are quite big enough as well,” she said, releasing the sling and coming toward him with her own fingers wide. He could give her only his left hand. The right was in too much pain.
It was pain that nothing had relieved. Not ice. Not even the best cognac in a fifty-fifty rinse with water, twelve tedious hours at a time. Not an anti-inflammatory paste of butcher’s broom or a salve of devil’s claw or an emulsion of ergot made from a rye fungus that caused him to feel there were insects crawling down between his fingers or a libation of bilberry juice (which he noticed improved his eyesight and reduced his need to squint), nor one of sarsaparilla, which strangely did seem to stretch his penis, or at least to render it more often swollen to its utmost girth, which he was too embarrassed to mention to Dr. Glock, to whom he was grateful for help with his hand in place of his previously incapacitated penis. And not even Dr. Otto’s electrotherapy, which sent chemically produced galvanic currents shooting up and down his arm and hand until he felt like screaming and finally did, though as soon as Dr. Otto turned off his machine, Robert felt in the skin of his arm a desire for it to be turned on again.
So he had been reduced—or was it elevated?—to this: an animal dip in the feces of an ox. Several of his doctors had told him to stick his hand into the thorax of the animal itself and let whatever was there—blood, entrails, this stuff—do its healing. But Robert had been embarrassed to ask the butcher for permission to stand in his shop thus ravishing one of his animals and most likely driving away other customers who might naturally question whether they should buy the meat of an animal into which a strange young man had not only thrust his hand but appeared to be allowing it to set up permanent residence, unless this was his way of showing affection, like a man who rests his hand all afternoon on the stomach of his sleeping dog. Besides, Robert had been almost giddy with the idea of taking the jar of feces home to see how Christel would react. The very thought of it had him giggling as he walked back to his room with his injured hand over the top of the jar so that no heat would be lost and no smell would be wasted on strangers.
It was not an unpleasant sensation, to partake thus of an animal dip—the warmth and softness of this substance soothed, and just as it proved so vital a fertilizer for plants, so it might very well ease the pain and stiffness in his finger. It would not cure his hand, as each of his doctors had made clear. He had done too much damage, not only to this finger but to those on either side of it. For all this he was grateful. His hands had stood in the way of what the Greeks called his nous, the self-expression of his being in the world outside himself. It was not enough to play the piano. It had never been enough. It was not enough even to write poems and stories. Music, he had decided, was poetry raised to a higher power. Spirits might speak the language of poetry, but angels communicated in tones. To have been freed actually to create music—this was indeed an exaltation of the soul.
Yet it was his body with which he was concerned at the moment. He had anticipated this worry and expressed it to Christian Glock: “Is there any danger that, when I dip a part of myself into the very hypostasis of the animal, I shall absorb some of its animality and thus become an animal myself?” Glock had answered, “The only hypo I see is a hypochondriac.”
Only Robert knew he had once been a horse, whinnying over his vision of taking Liddy Hempel from behind like an animal. And now that he had, with Christel, whose only inhibition seemed to be mortality itself, realized such an image in his very flesh, he knew he was animal enough and longed for the fulfillment of another vision, one not of the eyes but of the inner ear, to hear flowing from him the music he heard within his head.
“My God, that’s the stinkiest cigar I’ve ever smelled!”
Christel had finally awakened. Her long feet hung out beneath the sheet of his bed and rubbed one another against the chill in the room. She had only to touch herself to arouse him—in any way, with any part of her body on any other part; she had once crossed her eyes to make him laugh and in addition made him desirous.
