by J. D. Landis
“Beat them?”
Chopin smiled. “Or otherwise distract them while I make my escape.”
Robert opened the door. The street before the house was empty. “Gone,” he said.
He hoped, in a way, that Chopin would show some disappointment. But he seemed thoroughly relieved.
“I have never heard such music as yours,” said Robert.
“Nor I as yours,” responded Chopin as he put his head into his hat and walked away.
When Robert returned to the others, Mendelssohn was discussing Chopin’s rubato, that technique by which time was withheld from the beat, only to be restored a moment or two later. “He leans about within the measure,” said Mendelssohn, shaking his head. “When he and I play for each other, it’s like a Mohican and a Kaffir trying to have a conversation. He carries too much of Paris around with him—all that love of suffering and exaggeration of the emotions. And yet one feels one could listen to him play forever. There is something about his music—even when you see it written down, and you analyze it, it remains beyond comprehension. You can play it and wonder, even as you play, where this sound is coming from. And what about his idea of capturing sound! Imaginable but inconceivable, he says. I fear he’s right. It is one thing to reproduce an image that one sees. If a painter can do it, why not a scientist? But sound is invisible. We can represent it only by the ugly little symbols that are the tools of our trade. How could a trumpet call from a piece of paper? How could the voice of a soprano rise out of a closed book on someone’s piano in the dead of night? But imagine it, my friends! Music in the air and not a musician within smelling distance. Music everywhere and always.”
Mendelssohn shook his head but at the same time positively beamed. It was not difficult to imagine what he was thinking about: the sound of an entire orchestra, perhaps even combined with the kind of chorus he had conducted in the St. Matthew Passion in Berlin six years before, that historic performance that was now just gossip and in fact had been no more than that the moment after each note had been sung or played…sound apprehended, sealed, made immortal.
Mendelssohn lit a cigar, a rare indulgence.
“Imagine it,” he said again, clearly continuing to do so himself.
“The world would stop,” said Robert, whose own cigar was now not much longer than a finger joint. “If we could listen to music whenever we wanted, the world would stop.”
So pleased was he with the thought that he ignited a new cigar from the morsel of the old, which Clara wished she could take from the ashtray and place between her lips.
*Chopin was either being disingenuous or was not yet aware how inspiring he found Robert’s praise of his work—inspiring in his love life, that is. It would not be long before he, as would Balzac and Delacroix and Delaroche, not to mention Beau Brummel and the duke of Orléans, fell in love with, and indeed made love to, the magnificent Delfina Potocka. Hippolyte Delaroche may have ended up painting Delfina as the Virgin Mary, but it was Chopin who christened as her “little D-flat” the part of her that served as the door into her body through which all these great men entered. Once having occupied her, however, Chopin was led to question, as he put it, “what ballades, polonaises, perhaps whole concertos, have been forever consumed in your little D-flat.” He even perverted poor Plautus in quoting to Delfina a transposition of the Latin poet’s Oleum et operam perdidi, implying that he, Chopin, had squandered the oil from his lamp within the darkness of her little D-flat.
*Chopin was too fastidious in such matters and not, despite his several years’ residence in Paris, an accomplished enough gossip to mention his own regretted if indirect participation in this marital fiasco. His friend Franz Liszt, Chopin discovered by way of the most ghastly and incontrovertible evidence (of sight, of sound, of scent), had used Chopin’s Chaussée d’Antin apartment in which to make love to Camilla Pleyel. Though Chopin had heard rumors of Madame Pleyel’s multiple infidelities, he blamed himself for the impending divorce by having provided her and Liszt the venue in which to achieve their passionate tryst, which occurred in all its brutish jubilation beneath—at least it was not within!—the grand piano for which Chopin had traded his good name by allowing Monsieur Pleyel to attach that name to the following statement in La France musicale: “I know what ravishing effects can be obtained from Pleyel’s delightful pianos.” What was truly ravished was Madame Pleyel herself, no doubt staring up at the underside of her husband’s huge instrument, giggling in its shadow, and hitting all the right notes.
*Joseph Niepce had, in 1822, produced the first photograph and at the time Chopin invoked his name was, with his son Isidore, working in France with Louis Daguerre to perfect a method of causing light to fall on a suspension of silver salts so as to darken it in part and thus produce an image.
*The word Chopin employed in speaking to Liszt, and repeated here, was assommer, which means, it is true, to stun but in its colloquial usage carries the meaning to bore to death. Liszt, who believed Chopin was praising him, failed to grasp this further evidence of Chopin’s subtlety, not to mention his wit. Chopin’s Polish accent might have rendered his French a bit inelegant, but his use of the language itself was deft.
Leipzig
NOVEMBER 25, 1835
I remember how once when I wanted to kiss you, when you were a little girl,
you said to me, “No, later, when I am older.”
Robert Schumann
On the eve of her departure for a series of concerts in Zwickau, Clara stayed up with Robert long after the rest of the Wieck household had gone to sleep. Together, they did what they usually did in the evening, before she went to her room at the top of the house and he went home to write music: drank tea and coffee and Robert the more-than-occasional brandy to accompany his cigars, ate candies and pastries, played the piano for one another, talked. When they talked, it was mostly of music. Mendelssohn’s arrival in Leipzig had changed the very texture of the city’s air, as any city would be changed when its orchestra obtains a new and brilliant conductor. A city without music is like a meal without food. And a city whose musicians are led by a man of taste and intrepidity is a city whose very breath is sweetened and its sky enlarged. No conquering emancipator with his weapon held triumphantly aloft can bring such liberation as a man of music with his baton poised before the onrush of beauty.
In fact, the Gewandhaus orchestra had never before experienced the emancipating discipline of the baton. Its conductors had sat at the piano, nodding and shrugging and grimacing at the first violinist, who stood at his chair trying simultaneously to play and to dictate rhythm with his bow. But from the moment Mendelssohn arrived, he stood before the entire group, anointing them with the breeze from his slender whalebone baton, which was wrapped in white leather and appeared to be lighted from within.*
Two weeks earlier, Mendelssohn had conducted the Gewandhaus orchestra as Clara played for the first time her piano concerto, which she had completed almost exactly two years before, when she was fourteen and unsure enough of her ability at orchestration to have asked Robert to help her with it; which he did with the first movement and then left her on her own for the rest, much to her initial annoyance and later gratitude. By the time she felt the timpani rolls at the end of the second movement shake the very bench on which she sat, and continue shaking it at the opening of the third movement as they were joined by the brass fanfares she remembered having had so much amusement writing, she had come to understand the power she possessed. To write for an orchestra was like throwing stars into an empty sky. And then to write, and play, a solo part was to fly among those stars in danger and delight.
Later that same evening, Mendelssohn had removed his white gloves and come down from his conductor’s platform to sit at one piano while she sat at another and Louis Rakemann at a third, and the three of them performed Bach’s D-Minor Concerto. It was the first time any of the music of Leipzig’s greatest composer had been played in the fifty years of Leipzig Gewandhaus concerts and the first tim
e this particular piece had been presented in public in the nearly hundred years since it had been written and played upon harpsichords by Bach himself and his two eldest sons, Wilhelm Friedemann and Karl Philipp Emanuel. Of the three of them performing this November night, Rakemann seemed happiest, playing from memory so that he was able to gaze the whole time over his piano at Clara, united with her through the music as he would never be in the flesh and able this once not only to abide but to glory in such renunciation, a sacrifice he would question only when they were taking their bows and he grasped her right hand (Mendelssohn, more decorous, did not take her left) and once again his desire became almost unbearably corporeal.
Robert had written for New Journal of Music a fine review of the whole concert and of her concerto in particular (careful not to mention his own role in orchestrating its first movement), and they had between them now, spread out on a table, a copy of the magazine opened to his review, which both had memorized but neither felt the need to recite; it merely sat there like another voice in the room, unequivocally in support of their own union, such as it was, undefined to either of them, unspoken of by either of them, the great mystery at the core of their separate lives, about to become entangled forever.
Robert rose and said the same thing he had said several times earlier in the evening: “I really should be going. You have a long journey ahead of you tomorrow.”
“Oh, don’t go yet,” she said, and somewhat needlessly, because by the time she had finished even so brief a command or wish, whichever it was, Robert was squarely back in his seat.
He had no idea why he kept doing that. He had no desire to leave her, and he trusted her enough to know she had no desire for him to leave. In the past, when he had stayed too long, she had simply fallen asleep even as he spoke to her, the only one since Ludwig to whom he spoke with such ease and at such length, her legs tucked up beneath her on her chair, a posture that was quite modest and yet that utterly captured his attention, amazed as he was at the suppleness of her slender body and its difference from his own; that she could actually sit on her legs struck him as miraculous and so far from his own capabilities as to signal the most profound difference between their bodies.
“Are you not tired?” he asked.
“I’m exhausted.”
He rose again.
“Sit down,” she said. “Why do you keep getting up?”
“I was wondering that same thing myself.”
“Perhaps you’re restless. Perhaps I’m boring you.”
“I’m not the tired one. Perhaps I’m boring you.”
“You have never bored me, Robert, not in my entire life. But you have certainly tired me out.”
“I know I talk too much,” he said. “The more I talk to you, the less I talk to other people.”
“It’s not your talking,” she replied; “if I had my way, you would talk to me and to no one else. It’s your music, Robert. It’s your new sonata.”
He had brought to her that evening what he thought was his finished piece in G minor, which he had started working on almost ten years before and had completed but a few weeks ago. She had played it for him for the first time tonight but had stopped during the first movement and, pointing at the music before her on the piano, started to laugh.
“First you give the instruction, ‘As fast as possible,’ and then you say, ‘Faster,’ and then you say, ‘Faster still.’”
“Quite so.”
“But is it not impossible to play faster than ‘as fast as possible’?”
“Not for you,” he said. “Play on.”
So she had, until she reached the finale, a Presto in 6/16 time. “This is just too difficult,” she said. “Even those few of us for whom you write will not understand this.”
“That’s why I’ve marked it ‘Passionato,’” he said, as if this quite explained the music’s restrictive idiosyncrasy.
So she had struggled though the final movement. And only when she failed to recognize within it a theme that he had taken from her own writing did he begin to wonder whether the finale might be so obscure as to baffle even her, the one (living) person put on Earth when he’d been put on Earth who could play his music as he heard it in his head.*
They remained together far into the night, until finally she pulled her legs beneath her and closed her eyes. He sat quite still and watched her sleep, not moving even to take a sip of brandy or reach toward the ashtray for his cigar, which went out with that last cunningly sweet gasp of smoke a cigar gave forth before it died.
This, he thought, is how I want to spend my life. To sit before her while she sleeps until I am no more.
Finally, on the brink of peaceful sleep himself, far more peaceful in its approach than he ever found in bed, he rose from his chair and looked at her one last time, full of longing for her life and for her body, before he turned abruptly and walked toward the door, saying silently to himself and to her, “Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye.”
“Wait. Robert, wait. Wait, Robert.”
He turned around to see her smiling shyly from her chair.
“I fell asleep.”
“Yes.”
“I won’t have you sneaking off as usual before…”
“Yes?”
“Before I show you out.”
She stood and picked up the lamp from the table next to her chair and walked him to the stairs. He went down before her on the narrow stairway and when he reached the bottom looked back up at her. She seemed to be floating down to him on the light from her lamp, slowly as he waited until the light reached him and climbed down his body, causing him to open his arms to receive it and to receive her into them.
He held her for a moment as she stood on the last stair, his cheek against her neck and half his face hidden in her hair, before he lifted her down and put his mouth to hers and felt her lips open as he had never been able to imagine they would. Her hand not holding the lamp came around behind him and, in a fist, pressed into his spine, pulled him against her, as his own hands touched her neck, her shoulders, grasped the halves of her taut and slender back, which rose and fell with the same quick breaths he felt escape into his mouth.
When finally he drew his lips away from hers and looked into her face, her eyes were closed. He could feel her trembling, almost violently, and was afraid she might fall, and so he held her against him until her body ceased to move at all.
There they stood, silent and inseparable, until, without either of them knowing how, he found himself at home sitting at his piano writing the word innig on a sheet of music paper with one hand while the other sounded out the music itself, and she found herself with her father beside her in the carriage on the way to Zwickau.*
*The baton had first been used by Danile Türk, who became so excited over his innovative implement of command that he often inadvertently accompanied the music with a shattering of glass in the chandelier that hung without sufficient clearance above his head in the concert hall in Halle. In 1798, Joseph Haydn had used a baton when conducting The Creation, and Ludwig Spohr, who turned Clara’s pages in Kassel in 1832, had tried unsuccessfully to popularize the baton in 1825. But it was Mendelssohn who succeeded in placing the baton in the hand of virtually every conductor once he had revealed it to his Gewandhaus musicians and their audiences. He and Hector Berlioz exchanged batons, Berlioz’s accompanied by a letter so heavily influenced by his enthusiastic reading of The Last of the Mohicans that he addressed Mendelssohn as Great Chief, referred to their batons as tomahawks, and denigrated squaws and palefaces for their love of more ornate weapons than Mendelssohn’s sleek whalebone rod and Berlioz’s own oak stick.
*Three years later he replaced this finale with a Rondo in 2/4. He dedicated the piece to Henriette Voigt, who had recently died at the age of twenty-eight of the same disease, consumption, that had claimed the life of her great love, Ludwig Schunke, exactly two weeks shy of his twenty-fourth birthday.
*Innig was a notation Schumann would often thereafter put on his
music. It means both inward and intimate. It was while attaching it to this second of his Davidbündlertänze that he had what he described to Clara as “marriage thoughts,” which he went on to say “originated in the most joyous excitement I can ever recall. If I was ever happy at the piano, it was while composing these.”
Dresden
FEBRUARY 7, 1836
Union.
Robert Schumann
When Robert learned from his brother Eduard on February 4 that their mother had died in Zwickau, at the age of seventy, he locked himself in his room. He would speak to no one, not even Wilhelm Ulex, who, while he could not imagine the reason for his friend’s withdrawal, accepted it as further evidence that Robert’s genius isolated him from the world and that without such isolation his art would suffer. Why else would Robert make his best friend suffer the humiliation of living with a veritable ghost, unseen and untouched?—if not unheard, for there continued the sound of the piano, interrupted only by the sound of weeping.
It was not until another letter arrived on February 6 that Wilhelm was able to engage Robert in the flesh.
“There’s a letter for you,” he yelled through Robert’s door and, he hoped, over the sound of the piano.
No response.
“It’s a letter from Fräulein Wieck.”
The piano ceased. The door opened. Robert stood before him with his hand outstretched. He looked, as he often did when he was composing, haggard and almost maniacally distracted. But there seemed, as well, a weight atop him, crushing him in upon himself, whereas his music customarily seemed to shred him into a dozen weightless strips of airy, vulnerable being.
Wilhelm gave him the letter, which Robert placed flat in one hand while with a tip of the index finger of the other he tested the seal.
