by J. D. Landis
There was a beautiful little basket with a porcelain handle, and within the basket was a gold watch, which she hoped was not from Robert alone, because it was much too expensive and would mock the mere watch chain she had given him for his birthday in June.
Indeed, his card made clear that the watch was from the entire League of David, while the basket was from him alone. It was a fine basket, something to put on a shelf in her room and admire from afar. But it could not match the letter he had sent two weeks before, in which he had told her she had the face of an angel and had ended by saying, “You know how precious you are to me.”
His next gift came in a huge box. With her father standing over her, Clara went down on her knees to open it.
“Books?” he said with disbelief.
They were leatherbound and smelled quite wonderful. “‘The complete works of Bulwer-Lytton,’” she read from Robert’s card. She picked up one of the books. “The Last Days of Pompeii.”
Her father peered over her shoulder. “Volume Three! Why would he think you would ever have time to read all these books? We would need another carriage just to carry these to your performances.”
Clara hugged the book to her bosom. “Perhaps he plans to read them aloud to me.”
After a splendid morning with all the boys of David—Clara was, delightedly, the only woman—at the crowded and noisy Kuchengarten, where Clara hid behind a giant bouquet of stork’s-bill so she wouldn’t have to make a speech, everyone went back to the Wieck house for dinner. There she changed from one birthday dress, of merino, into another, of mousseline de soie.
The guest of honor at her birthday dinner was Felix Mendelssohn, who had arrived in Leipzig only two weeks earlier. He had been driven out of Berlin by religious intolerance—“They apparently do not like Lutherans there,” he quipped—and into Leipzig by the offer of the directorship of the Gewandhaus orchestra, whose members he won over by immediately securing for them a handsome raise in pay.
Mendelssohn was at this time twenty-six, one year older than Robert and vastly more renowned. At the age of twelve, after a year in which he had written several symphonies, two operas, and some complex fugues for string quartet, he had played for, and virtually been adopted by, Goethe, who agreed to receive him after Felix’s teacher had written to say that the boy was not only his best student but, though the son of a Jew, no Jew himself. As Felix had mentioned to Clara in Paris in 1831, Goethe compared himself to King Saul when he said to Felix, “You are my David,” having no idea that at the same time in Zwickau there was another David sitting at the piano playing Bach.
When Mendelssohn was fifteen, Ignaz Moscheles had traveled all the way from London to Berlin simply to hear him play the piano. At sixteen, Mendelssohn had written his Octet for strings and the next year his Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream.* One month beyond his twentieth birthday, he brought Sebastian Bach back from the dead with his revival of the St. Matthew Passion in Berlin.
It was to Berlin that his grandfather, Moses Mendelssohn, had walked the eighty miles from Dessau in 1743, when he was fourteen. As a Jew, he was required to skulk into the capital of Imperial Prussia through a particular portal. On the day Moses Mendelssohn entered Berlin, the guard wrote, “Today through the Rosenthaler Gate passed six oxen, seven pigs, one Jew.”
Most Jews in Berlin became beggars or peddlers, for want of any other permissible occupation: they were not allowed to manufacture anything, nor to supply the government or army with anything they might have manufactured had they been allowed to in the first place, nor to own land, nor (even as the peddlers they were allowed to become) to sell anything—food in particular, for obvious reasons—except to other Jews, nor to teach anything, including music, to anyone but other Jews, nor to touch anyone who was not a Jew with so much as a fingertip, let alone so intimate a part of the body as a lip. Only their human waste was allowed to mingle with that of non-Jews, on the theory that Jews made good fertilizer, though curiously they were required to inhabit their own cemeteries.
It was in Berlin that Moses Mendelssohn was befriended by Robert Schumann’s distant relative Gotthold Lessing, the man who was for an evening to have the happy experience of forgetting that he was who he was without having to stop being who he was. It was upon Moses Mendelssohn, who practiced one of the most difficult professions to suppress—he was a Thinker—that Lessing based the hero of Nathan the Wise.
Moses’ son, Abraham—the self-proclaimed “dash” between Moses and Felix, the man known first as the son of his father and then as the father of his son—eventually settled in Hamburg, where Felix was born in 1809. Three years later, the entire family was forced by the approach of Napoleon’s Russia-bound army—under the command of the merciless Marshal Davout, who indeed succeeded in occupying Hamburg—to flee back to Berlin. But if Napoleon had uprooted them, he had also made them rich: In defeating Prussia in 1806, he had blockaded all trade with his remaining enemy, England, which allowed Abraham Mendelssohn, operating out of Hamburg’s ungovernable port, to carry on as one of history’s most benign if successful smugglers an illicit trade with that country in iron, leather, coffee, and tea, and in particular the English cloth so prized that it was worn, however traitorously if cozily, by French troops.
It was in Berlin in 1816 that the Mendelssohns converted their children to Lutheranism (they themselves would sneak off later to Frankfurt to effect the same inversion). This was by no coincidence whatsoever the same year that the Prussians issued the following votum, which means, as does the word vote, a vow, even a desire:
It would be best not to have any Jews in this country. We must suffer those we presently have, but at the same time we must ceaselessly attempt to make them as inoffensive as possible. Jews must be converted to Christianity, and all their rights as citizens will depend on this conversion. As long as a Jew remains a Jew, he cannot exist in the eyes of the State.
In an attempt to bury once and for all his family’s debilitating Jewishness under the protective and ordurous shroud of a Christian name, Felix’s father took his four children in great secrecy to the Church of Jerusalem, where they were baptized Bartholdy, the name of a large garden by the river in Berlin, which the family purchased. But the Berliners were not fooled. From then on, proving that it’s easier to convert a piece of earth than the soul of man, Bartholdy Garden became known publicly as Jew Garden.
Felix, though he considered himself a Lutheran, preferred the name Mendelssohn to either Bartholdy or Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, particularly because in England, the country that had made his family rich and where he was most lionized as both performer and composer, he was known simply as Mendelssohn, and he knew enough to know that the last people one should confuse are one’s best customers.
He was a very handsome young man. George Grove called his face “the most beautiful I ever saw, like what I imagine our Saviour’s to have been.”
Like his grandfather, Moses, Felix knew German, Italian, English, French, Greek, and Latin. As children, he and his sisters published a newspaper from their home with contributions from the likes of Heinrich Heine and Georg Hegel.* By the time he was eleven, he had written more than sixty pieces of music, which he copied in a hand so precise that those who saw the compositions believed they had been press-printed.
Robert had been introduced to Felix in the Gewandhaus by none other than Henriette Voigt, who had progressed from making sexual matches to those of a wholly musical nature. At that first meeting, Robert said, “I know all your work.”
“Good Lord,” replied Mendelssohn. “I wrote so many pieces as a child that for anyone to see them now would be the equivalent of my standing here on the Gewandhaus stage with my pants down.”
“Exactly as I’ve imagined myself many times,” said Robert.
“With whom?”
“Oh, I couldn’t possibly say.”
“But you must,” said Mendelssohn.
“You really must,” said Henriette.
“A young l
ady,” said Robert.
“I had imagined no other,” said Mendelssohn. “How young?”
“Almost sixteen, I should imagine,” said Henriette.
“That isn’t young,” said Mendelssohn. “I was in love with Delphine von Schauroth in Munich when she was sixteen. Of course, I was only twenty-two then myself, so there wasn’t much distance between our ages.”
Feeling instantly that he had met a man who, among all men, would best understand him, Robert said, “I trust I am not imposing upon your good will and the brevity of our acquaintance if I invite you to Clara Wieck’s birthday party as our guest of honor.”
“Oh, Fräulein Wieck. That would be a great pleasure. I met her in Paris several years ago, though I doubt she’d remember me, for I was suffering at the time from a most incautious haircut. She was just a child then, as I recall, and certainly had not attained the renown that now attaches to her name. How old will she be at this birthday we shall be celebrating together?”
“Sixteen,” said Robert, smiling hugely.
After a dinner of smoked salmon and cold cucumber soup and roast duck with apple-sausage stuffing and potato dumplings and red cabbage braised with vinegar—the entire meal, which lasted the good part of the afternoon, accompanied by and washed down with copious amounts of champagne—all that remained were the toasts and the music.
Her father praised her talent and her yet-to-be-realized stupendous income.
Dr. Reuter proclaimed her now a woman, which made her father look at him as if he wanted to snatch his cigar out of his imprudent mouth.
Wilhelm Ulex admired her dress.
Louis Rakemann, who was a good enough musician to have been rehearsing with Clara for a performance of Bach’s D-Minor Concerto and a poor enough judge of character to imagine that she might care for him as much as he cared for her, said, “My desires for you are no less than my desires for myself. Long life. Good music. And a husband worthy of your gifts.”
“Thank you for informing us, Louis, that one of your desires is for a husband,” said Julius Knorr, inspiring great amusement in all but Rakemann.
Knorr, who by that time had put his foot up on the table, leaned forward to remove it with both hands, rose unsteadily, and made his own toast: “If I played the piano half as well as you, I’d be twice as far away from here than I am,” which Clara, kindly, took to mean that since he was here and nowhere else, he was doubly pleased to have been asked to her party and to have been given the opportunity to make peace with Robert, whom Julius had threatened to take to court until Robert had paid him twenty-five thalers for his interest in the magazine.
Some others, however, did not interpret Knorr’s words so charitably and told him to sit down, which he did with such haste that he left some of his champagne dancing briefly by itself in the air before it drizzled down quite scrupulously into the glass that had abandoned it.
Felix Mendelssohn said, “I came to Leipzig not to direct the music of the orchestra but to be directed to Heaven by the music in you.”
When all had toasted her but Robert, and Clara had excused his silence by reminding herself that when there was music boiling up inside him he sometimes seemed to neglect to speak as a chef forgets to eat, he suddenly pushed back his chair and stood up with a glass of champagne in each hand. “I have known Clara Wieck since she was eight years old, half her life ago. When first I met her, all I could see was her music. Today, all I can hear is her beauty. In the time between, she has grown more charming every day, every hour, within as well as without. She has made me laugh. She has made me weep. But most of all she has made me grateful. To have been put on Earth at the same time as she is to have been given a gift that only God and chance could provide. And it is a gift shared by all of us here today—to live in her time, to live in her company, to live within sight and sound of her. There is no one in the world like her, and no world is like ours in its being blessed by her presence. I drink to her twice: in admiration; in affection.”
Robert emptied first one glass of champagne, then the other. She saw that both his hands were trembling, but not enough to match the trilling of her heart and the shiver in her spine.
All the other men at the table drank to her as well with a glass in each hand, except for her father, who leaned against her and whispered, “He is drunk.”
“So am I,” she replied, though her glasses were full.
From there, all retired to the largest of the music rooms, the men with cigars and brandy, she with her gold watch and what was left of a plum tart she cupped in her hand within a linen napkin. Everyone asked her to play the piano, but she graciously ceded the bench and pride of first place to Mendelssohn, who was not only her distinguished guest but whose piano playing she knew wholly by reputation and preferred to experience by sound before she undertook to perform in his presence. Whether inspired by fear or merely example, a pianist flew higher in the draft of other, earlier birds.
To rid his fingers of both torpidity and the suasions of champagne, Mendelssohn wreathed through some Bach fugues, much to Robert’s delight, and then, to the delight of all, through improvisations in the styles first of Chopin and second of Liszt. When Clara begged him to play his own music, Mendelssohn began with what seemed a deliberate echo of his previous beginning, a fugue of his own in E minor, which crescendoed and accelerandoed to a huge false climax before subduing itself in a quiet iteration of the fugue theme with, at the very end, so unexpected a diminuendo on a rising scale that Clara rose from her chair. All the others in the room followed her example, mistaking her powerlessness before this music for mere admiration of it.
Mendelssohn seized the opportunity of her standing to invite her to join him at the piano. He placed before them the piano part of his BMinor Capriccio, and together they played it, he from memory and she by sight, but he no better than she, because he guided her somehow, with the flow of his body and the occasional pressure of his shoulder against hers and every once in a while a kind of anticipatory hum she knew no one else could hear, a pretty little snatch of song that made her giddy.
He took her hand when they were done and pulled her to her feet. Then he drew her forward so that, from his greater height, she was forced into a mighty bow before her friends and her father, all of whom applauded her and him and called for more.
“You’ll get no more from me,” Mendelssohn addressed them. “For me to play with her is like a pig in a race with an antelope. While I grunt in the mud, she takes wing like an angel to the heavens. So please, my friends, allow me to join you at the trough while together we feed on such ambrosia as might fall from her fingers.”
They all laughed at his exaggerated graciousness, and then again when Julius Knorr shouted, “That doesn’t sound terribly kosher to me.”
“What will you play?” Mendelssohn asked her.
“What would you like me to play?”
“Something you love.” Mendelssohn then turned from her and looked around the room, as if for music floating in the air. “Something by him.” He pointed at Robert.
“Something I love,” she said, and nearly added, by someone I love.
She played Robert’s new Sonata in F-sharp minor, which he had sent to her only a few days earlier accompanied by a note saying he had been inspired by a melody of hers* and that at the same time this piece was a cry of his heart for her. She had wanted to tell him it was her heart that belonged to him, but her father had insisted upon providing her words of gratitude and had dictated to her the note he insisted she send back: “Thank you for the sonata. I look forward to finding the time to play it someday.”
This was the time.
*It was when Mendelssohn was sixteen that Heinrich Dorn, not long thereafter to become Robert’s teacher, played for Felix one of Dorn’s own compositions. They did not meet again for another sixteen years, at which time Mendelssohn played for Dorn that very same piece, which Dorn did not recognize and had no memory of having written. Mendelssohn, who had not even played it befor
e this moment, knew it perfectly. He absorbed music into his memory the way other men did long-ago moments of love.
*Not many years hence, Mendelssohn would attend the University of Berlin, where he would hear his former contributor lecture on the aesthetics of music. It is not known whether during those lectures Hegel said what later (not long before the cholera epidemic of 1831 carried him off) he wrote with such authority that his words continue to this day to echo in the minds of all humanity: “The fundamental character of the romantic is the musical.”
*Her “Scène fantastique.”
Leipzig
OCTOBER 4, 1835
I do not regard Carnaval as music.
Frédéric Chopin
When Clara and her father and Robert returned from a long afternoon walk, during which not a word was spoken because of Friedrich Wieck’s insistence that such walks were for exercise and that the tongue was the only part of the body a pianist didn’t need to strengthen, they found Felix Mendelssohn sitting in the drawing room of the Wieck house. There was a man beside him, but he didn’t get up to greet them when Mendelssohn did.
Clara recognized him immediately. In the three years since she had leapt over his back in Paris, he had become perhaps the most revered pianist in Europe; if Franz Liszt were more renowned, this was owed not entirely to his playing. He had also, she saw, become both more beautiful and more pallid, his eyes weary and yet almost desperately lucent.
He reached out his hand toward her. “Now I remember you,” he said in his heavily accented French. “Please forgive my not rising both to the occasion and to yourself—I am not as strong as I was when last you saw me and we frolicked.”
“Monsieur Chopin,” she said. He no longer smelled sweet; perhaps he had not played the piano in a while. His hand felt strangely small. She wondered why the critic Rellstab had said that if you were going to play Chopin’s études you’d best have a surgeon by your side. She had played enough of them to know that as long as you were willing to break some chords, you needn’t break your hand.
