Longing

by J. D. Landis

  In consequence, society itself was weakened, corrupted, and desolated: When art is trivialized and debased, the resulting devastation makes war and famine and plague and natural catastrophe seem negligible. It is one thing to die individually or to be wiped out en masse. It is another and far more grievous thing entirely to be forced to live in a time of squalid art.

  Nowhere was this more evident than among pianists, who allowed themselves to become so celebrated for their technique that they were forced to write their own music simply to find pieces showy and empty enough to play, with the result that those called the greatest musicians of their time were also held to be the greatest composers of all time: Henri Herz, Franz Hünten, even the young Sigismond Thalberg.

  It was enough to tempt one to destroy his hand. And Robert was to some of these men—Wieck as his former piano teacher being the primary dissenter, and Dr. Reuter not far behind—a hero for that act. They interpreted his act as a symbolic gesture, but hardly empty, given the pain involved and the ruination of a brilliant career. He had confronted the Philistines and had slung the potent, smooth stone deep within his own brain. Who better to lead them?

  Otto Nicolai, back from too long a visit to the Teatro La Fenice in Venice to understand how a magazine might save the world, not to mention accomplish so impossible a task as to exalt a Schubert over a Pixis, asked Robert how he thought music could be written about in the first place, words and music being so antithetical.

  “I learned more about counterpoint from Jean Paul than from anyone else,” said Robert. “A painter can learn color from a Beethoven symphony, and a musician can learn rhythm from a Goethe poem.”

  “But how can music be described in words?” said Nicolai.

  “Much like this cigar”—Robert waved his—“if you have the capacity to appreciate it.” He put the cigar between his beer-washed, chastity-plumped lips and drew from it a huge mouthful of smoke, which he released in a stream through his mouth and drew back into his head through his nose. “Of course, should we find ourselves sucking upon one that’s foul, we’ll call it such. If you can’t attack what’s bad about a work, then you can’t defend what’s good about it. So let us drink to the dawn of a new poetic age.”

  As they toasted, Ludwig Böhner lost nearly all his drink as he missed bashing his stein against Joseph Mainzer’s. But even as he licked what beer he could from his saturated sleeve, he asked Robert, “Surely you have not chosen words over music?”

  Robert shook his head. “Literature interprets us, but music defines us.”

  “Brilliant!” It was an unfamiliar voice, deep and somewhat rasping, as if something had eaten away at it, and to Robert’s musician’s ear sounding the way he had always imagined Weber’s voice after he had swallowed the acid. It had come from a strange young man, a new young man, tall, thin, with huge curls rising from his high forehead to swim back over his raised collar and snow-dusted crimson scarf, a trim mustache atop a wide, smiling mouth, a glorious thin nose hooked like something off an ancient statue, and eyebrows hovering delicately over eyelids almost swollen with intelligence. Who can this be? thought Robert. He must be the one they’d been waiting for.

  “Ludwig Schunke from Stuttgart,” he softly introduced himself to the table.

  From the moment Ludwig had appeared at Krause’s Cellar, everyone had admired him.

  Some thought he looked like John the Baptist. Others claimed he resembled the kind of idealized Roman emperor who might be dug up at Pompeii.

  Robert could not disagree but displayed his erudition in stating that Ludwig most reminded him of Thorwaldsen’s bust of Schiller, though privately he saw, when he looked at Ludwig, a man with the beauty of Bernaert van Orley as painted by Dürer, hat cocked, mouth voluptuous, eyes on eternity, and hair of such inviting, shining softness that it tempted one to put one’s hands within it, on either side of Ludwig’s head, and bring his face so close it could not be distinguished from one’s own.

  He bestowed upon Ludwig as his Davidite New Journal of Music pseudonym the name Jonathan, for Ludwig had immediately become his best friend in the world and in becoming his Jonathan had made sense for him finally of the whole notion of the fight against the Philistines and his own assumption of the kingdom of, and as, David.

  Robert had joked with Ludwig that as Davidites they lead off the first issue of New Journal of Music with a pledge to deliver to its audience the foreskins of a hundred Philistines.* After they had amused one another in discussing drunkenly (Robert on Rhine wine, Ludwig on the bitter coffee with which he tried to acidify his disease to death) just what the foreskins of Herz and Hünten might look like, they settled more seriously on a message declaring their aim to be to deliver the poetry of art to a place of honor among men.

  Robert and Ludwig lived their belief. They immersed themselves completely in their work, and did not drown in the madness of it only because they rescued one another from the abstraction of composition and the austerity of the endless repetition necessary for the illusion of spontaneity.

  In the beginning, they had lived in two rooms, each in his own with his piano and his bed and his books. But because they were home all day, before going out together most nights to the taverns, and because each worked ceaselessly at his music from dawn to dusk (and in Robert’s case sometimes long beyond), they found the sound of one another’s piano, as occasionally beautiful as the music from it might be, so distracting that neither could work to his full capacity.

  So they moved to new rooms, also on the ground floor, at 21 Burgstrasse, and each still had his own room, but between them they now had a completely empty room, or almost completely empty. The only thing in it was the Turkish rug that had been in Robert’s father’s office in Zwickau, which Robert had begged his mother to ship to him as soon as he and Ludwig had signed their lease. The rug was large even for a work produced by the lavish villagers of Ladik and as thick and durable as a Persian Bidjar but wholly floral in its decoration because of the Koran’s admonition against the portrayal of either men or beasts. Even now, nearly eight years after Robert had found his father sitting dead with his feet planted lightly but finally upon this very carpet, it smelled of his tobacco and the bindings of his books and the million exhalations of his sweet breath that in the midst of sleepless nights Robert could still feel reach from the Heaven in which he did not believe to his own aggrieved lips.

  Sometimes, when he and Ludwig happened to take a break from their work at the same time, they would meet and sit beside one another upon this rug in the middle of this vast, empty room and, like tiny figures alone on the deceivingly flat plane of the earth, talk and sing to one another.

  Robert had begun to compose some of what he called dances in honor of his colleagues on the magazine, but he could not maintain a strict dance form in any of them and realized they were beginning to form a conversation not between himself and Ludwig, as he would have wished, or himself and Clara, whose voice he could not yet locate in his music, but between two sides of himself, at least, for he sometimes felt he had been shattered at birth and was made up of an army of different souls, all of whom might be dressed in the same uniform but few of whom fought on the same side. For the very first dance, in G, Robert borrowed a tune he had heard Clara composing at the piano, all in the left hand, a kind of double ascension toward a frolic of higher, sunnier notes. Ludwig was much taken with this theme, as he was with the clash in Robert’s music, as in Robert himself, between bliss and anguish. Robert, who, as a man divided between the solidity of the word and the evanescence of sound, loved to bedeck his music with little mottos and epigraphs, penned at the top of this first dance, when he handed it to Ludwig to play, the words from an old German maxim: “Forever and ever, joy and pain* are joined.” They punned in English with the word lust and punned in German with the similar sounds of Leid and the word for song, Lied.

  Robert was inspired by Ludwig’s ability to understand his music and to play it as Robert wrote it at the piano even as he c
ould not quite force his hands to play it. Even more than Clara—which might have been the result merely of her youth and the visible fear in her eyes and hands of confronting the darker, wilder crasis of eternal tones Robert found hidden in the piano—Ludwig grasped the music and in so doing lay hold of its creator. Until Robert heard and saw, awe struck, Ludwig play his Toccata, which he came to believe he must have revised in supersensual anticipation of Ludwig’s arrival into his life, he had not believed any pianist would achieve his own turbulent vision of the work and, more prosaically, that its final chord would ever be achieved without arpeggiation, until he saw Ludwig embrace those dilated notes with the ingenerate ease of a hawk’s clasp of a rat.

  But for Ludwig, there was something unnatural about Robert’s work: not the music itself, but how it was made. Robert wrote always at the piano, a cigar clenched in his teeth, a thick pen shoved into the rift of dark hair over the helix of one ear while his spectacles swung from the other, his eyes squinting through the cigar smoke and the haze of indecision, sometimes at his hands upon the keyboard and sometimes at the sheets of music paper covered with what looked like black teeth.

  When he worked, he worked within a globe of time that was transparent but imperforate. He didn’t lock himself away but was unapproachable until he finished. Robert’s insomnia allowed him—forced him, Ludwig sometimes thought—to work all night, and he seemed able to go three days without sleep, nearly without food, certainly without bathing or shaving, producing music like evidence in his defense.

  His life hung in the balance. When his work went poorly, or did not go at all, he seemed to have died. If he spoke, his speech was slow and monotonic. If he walked, it was only across the room, the way one would to a gallows, body crushed from the shoulders down, feet flat, head nailed shut. If he breathed, he did so almost secretly, discernible only to someone who loved him, all in the upper chest, almost in the throat itself; panicked breathing. His stomach was in turmoil. Fart he did, from one corner of his room to another. It was a wonder there was not a depression in his piano bench to match that in his mind. Long coils of giddy noise pushed outward from his guts before he’d oboe out the gas, only to have the entire process begin again within the instant. He trembled. He sweated the cold sweat of unaccomplishment. He suffered terribly in the grip of nihility.

  But when his work went well, then he became truly worrisome. He might sit at the piano for twenty-four hours straight. He might smile demonically with darting eyes at the notes escaping from his fingers. He might cry out, “Genius! Genius!” This gratification, such as it was, was shadowed always by misery, for he knew not its source and trusted not its return. So utterly was he at the mercy of the ebb and flow of music that he felt engulfed, oblivious to the disgrace of silence. It was an exhilaration he feared he could not bear for long.

  When they chanced to discuss this, usually in the empty room, Robert remembered none of it. Upon finishing a piece of music, he knew only exhaustion. He could fall asleep in the middle of a sentence. He could sleep, there upon his father’s old rug, for the same twenty-four hours’ duration in which he was capable of composing, and Ludwig would throw over him Emilie’s strange blanket made of rabbit skins beneath which Robert slept, or tried to, when he dared lie down upon his derisive bed.

  As Robert was consumed by his music and compulsive in his composition of it, Ludwig was consumed, literally, by consumption itself. Robert had never before been with someone whose death was so clearly written in his flesh. Emilie might have gone on living for years, if she could have borne the itch that attacked the very part of her body that should have given her the greatest pleasure. His father had died suddenly and unexpectedly, as had little Robert and Rosalie and Julius and as would he himself, he ardently wished, so that he need not have to find in himself the courage he saw in Ludwig, putting one foot after the other as they made their way through Leipzig when Ludwig knew full well that he could count the footsteps left to him and count the meals and count the days and nights and count the hours left for music and for love.

  *Mainzer had been influenced in the schema of his career by that of the French priest Félicité Robert de Lamennais, whose burgeoning liberalism was attacked generally by Pope Gregory XVI’s encyclical Mirari Vox, which condemned not only freedom of the press but also freedom of individual conscience, and specifically by the encyclical Singulari Nos, which pronounced Lamennais’s belief in the equality of all men to be “contrary to the word of God, false, calumnious, leading to anarchy.” As Mainzer himself commented on this condemnation, which drove Abbé Lamennais from the Church, “Anarchy is the despot’s term for liberty.”

  *Whose brother, August, inspired Madame de Staël to write Germany, her study of German culture, which Napoleon felt belittled French culture. So in the very year he attended the birth of Robert Schumann in Zwickau, the emperor took the time to ban Germany, ordered all 10,000 copies of the French edition destroyed, and was confirmed in his conviction that his having banished Madame de Staël from Paris seven years earlier was evidence of the necessity of political prophylaxis.

  **Both Schlegels, like most of their fellow German romantics, inspired by the writings of the mystic seventeenth-century cobbler, Jacob Böhme, believed that true sexual perfection resided in the androgyne. Since, however, a man could not marry himself, nor make true love to himself, or marry another man with or without making love to him, the Schlegels decided the only practical place to locate the androgyne was inside the boundaries of ostensibly normal heterosexual union, where a man could make love to as many men or women as he wanted within the infinite confines of monogamy’s multifaceted mirror. Friedrich’s androgynous ideal was Caroline Michaelis, whom he compared to Plato’s own androgyne, Diotima. And Caroline, with devastating courtesy, satisfied his lust for hermaphroditic dissipation by running off with, and marrying, his brother. Seven years later, however, she left August for Friedrich Schelling, whose pansexual view of the world encompassed the inevitable decline of physical desire in any relationship by promoting in its place the idea that the artist, in engendering art, creates the world itself. Friedrich Schiller would have none of this and feuded with the Schlegels before his premature death from outrage over Romantic excess. A poem of unknown authorship popular at the time read:

  Of Schiller and Schlegels and Schelling

  The pronouncing’s as hard as the spelling.

  Just to tell them apart

  Demands scholarly art.

  And their love lives are less than compelling.

  *The foreskins of Philistines were routinely cut off by the Jews as an aid in enumerating enemy dead. This method was not completely accurate insofar as the occasional Philistine was, during battle and quite incidentally, circumcised or at least genitally mutilated and thus might as easily and joyously be counted a Jewish casualty by the Philistines as a Philistine casualty by the Jews. When King Saul ordered David to deliver a hundred Philistine foreskins in order to win his daughter’s hand in marriage, David returned from battle with two hundred, half of them for Michal, whom he married, and half of them for her brother, Jonathan, whom he buried.

  *Lust und Leid.

  Leipzig

  APRIL 3, 1834

  Along came Ernestine.

  Robert Schumann

  Ernestine von Fricken hailed from Asch. But Clara met her in Plauen, the town in which Clara had spent her fourth summer on earth with her mother and her mother’s lover before her father had recalled her to Leipzig and her mother and Herr Bargiel had moved to Berlin. It was here that Ernestine and her father approached Clara and her father within moments of Clara’s having taken her final bows, the orchestra behind her seemingly as moved by her playing as the audience before her was stunned.

  “She was magnificent,” said the man who had introduced himself as Baron von Fricken.

  Because he addressed her father and not herself, as if she were, like musicians of old, the property of some patron rather than of her own imperious need to make music
and of her father’s to make money, Clara ignored the man’s praise and concentrated on his daughter.

  Ernestine was as open a girl as Clara had ever seen. Her face positively beamed with the pleasure of the occasion, and her blonde hair provided her the radiance of an innocent flower at full bloom. Her bosom made up in proud visibility what it lacked in scope.

  “How old are you?” asked Clara, not, she hoped, like a child in a schoolyard but like a woman in search of intimacies.

  “I’ll be eighteen in September.” Ernestine had a voice as airy as her face.

  “Not the thirteenth?” asked Clara more excitedly than she would have wished.

  “Is that your birthday?”

  “Yes.”

  “We were born in the same month.” Ernestine found this the occasion for taking Clara’s hand, which was something Clara did not customarily encourage in the aftermath of one of her concerts, though she did not object at all in this instance, since she trusted that Ernestine’s desire was to touch another woman, not merely a pianist whose corporeality and thus reality could presumably be determined in no other way.

  “I’m fourteen,” Clara admitted, proud of not feeling the need to boost herself into the next age.

  “Everyone knows that,” said Ernestine, shaking her program as evidence of Clara’s notoriety.

  “So you don’t think I’m too young?” asked Clara.

  “Too young for what?” Ernestine did not giggle as she said this but assumed as much gravity as her blithesome being would allow.

  “Too young for—”

  Clara’s father interrupted. “Baron von Fricken has asked if he might be allowed to enroll his daughter as my pupil. I have accepted her as such. Without the customary audition.” Her father nodded at Baron von Fricken to solicit a show of gratitude for what was not, Clara knew, an extraordinary circumstance. The baron smiled gratefully in the midst of a vigorous outnodding of the generous pedagog before him. “She will come to live in our home as soon as he can arrange her removal from Asch.”