by J. D. Landis
Chopin seemed to give this some thought before he said, “Perhaps it is better for your secret listener to remain both secret and, as you say, your distant beloved. To me, inspiration comes only when I have abstained from a woman for a long time. I find that when I have emptied myself into a woman, I become totally uninspired. Imagine—for a single moment of ecstasy we waste our lives. Not all of us, of course. The average man who tries to live without a woman will simply go mad with frustration. But a genius who suffers unrequited love and unfulfilled passion, made all the worse by the image inside his head of the distant beloved, will discover a great enhancement of his creativity. Men like us must renounce women—only then will the energy in our bodies make its way to our brains in the form of inspiration and thus we may give birth to a true work of art.”
“Maria Wodzinska?” guessed Robert.
Chopin nodded sadly.
“Have you…?”
“I have asked for her hand. If I obtain that, the rest of her will surely follow. In the meantime, I have been told by her mother that I am in a trial period. She warns me to drink gum water and go to bed early every night and to wear warm socks. Maria herself is making me a pair of slippers.”
“There’s nothing like a pair of warm socks,” said Robert, “to enhance one’s creativity.”
Chopin laughed, finally, until—though with infinite grace—he coughed.*
The next day, Clara turned seventeen. Robert, having been informed by Chopin that Wieck had deliberately scheduled a concert that night for Clara in Naumburg so she would be away from Robert in case he might be tempted to communicate with her on her birthday, went to her house very early that morning, before she would have left. He found her where he thought he might, and heard her first, practicing at the parlor piano for her concert, awake before the household, sitting at her piano as her birthday dawned and no one, he imagined, heard her play but him. He could see her face clearly enough through the window to see she was smiling and wondered why there were no tears, shed because they would not be together on her birthday as they had always been together, shed because they might never again be together. And yet, he wondered, what kind of love is it that wishes the lover to be sad? If he truly loved her, he would wish her to be happy no matter the circumstance, no matter the loss. So, he thought, she must be smiling at her memory of him and at her dreams that they would meet again and at the music she played so wonderfully, imagining with each note that he could hear it but unable to imagine for a moment that he stood there at the window gazing in at her until the very heat of his breath upon the glass caused her to disappear and all he was left with was the sound of her fingers in his flesh.
From that moment on, it really was as if she had disappeared. He heard nothing of her for months, or would allow himself to hear nothing. That winter became the darkest of times, and he tried to make himself forget her. When he learned, much later, that on the very day of her seventeenth birthday the carriage taking her to Naumburg had overturned and she was cut on the head and face and bruised about the arms and legs, and might, it was said, have been killed, he realized that their estrangement had been complete, because otherwise he would have known of her pain and the threat to her life without having been told.
He took up again with Christel in Leipzig. And then, to escape Christel and the vision of Clara that invaded her body when he made love to her, he went to stay with friends in Maxen, where he met Anna Robena Laidlaw, who helped him keep his mind off what his eyes could not avoid—Sonnenstein, the old castle directly on the Elbe that had been turned into an insane asylum, from which the incurable “inmates,” as they were called, had for the past several years been transferred out no longer to prison but directly to the Caruses’ asylum in Colditz. He sometimes imagined admitting himself to Sonnenstein and behaving incurably mad, so that he too might be transferred to Colditz and thus find his way, finally, into the bed of Agnes Carus, or she into his, so they might make love among the madmen. But this itself was, was it not, the thinking of a madman? How much more sensible to trade Agnes for Anna, if he could not trade all the women in the world for the one he loved.
Anna was sixteen years old, court pianist to the queen of Hanover, heir to a Scottish fortune, and so beautiful in a pale, blond way that Robert believed he might succeed in replacing Clara with her, move her into his mind by fixing upon the image of her physical being and sliding it into his consciousness as one might an unfamiliar key into a consequential lock. He was determined to possess her solely that she might possess him.
In Maxen, all was innocent. Anna was traveling with her mother and the conductor of the Hanover orchestra, but she was remarkably unchaperoned; her guardians might be his as well and determined it would benefit him and Anna equally that they become lovers.
She would come to see him by herself, delighted to catch him in his dressing gown, smoking his cigar. Her grandmother, she said, had been a friend and benefactor of Sir Walter Scott, having come to his aid when his Ballantyne publishing house went bankrupt and he needed money to pay off his debts and to complete work on his, as Anna called it, ostentatious castle, Abbotsford on the Tweed. His father, he replied, had both translated and published Scott in Germany. Instantly, Anna became Scott’s village maid who stole through the shade, her shepherd’s suit to hear, as Anna sang, and together they sat at the piano and improvised tunes as they tested each other’s knowledge of Scott, the reward to both winner and loser being a shared kiss:
O lovers’ eyes are sharp to see,
And lovers’ ears in hearing;
And love, in life’s extremity,
Can lend an hour of cheering.
It was all Robert wanted, an hour of cheering, hour after hour, to forget his true beloved in the arms of someone who loved him. Anna followed him to Leipzig, and there he took her rowing and smiled up at her as she gave a recital and hosted her postrecital dinner and reviewed her glowingly in his magazine and walked with her through the rose garden and picked a rose that was the best rose he could find but was not, he said, worthy of her, and it was clutching that rose that she went with him for the first time to his bed, and, with Anna in his arms, Robert found himself longing for Clara.
It was truly a longing for what was not there. Perhaps this was the secret Sanskrit of Nature—a longing not for the Infinite but for the body of an absent lover. Clara did not exist. Anna had replaced her. And yet, the closer he became to Anna—the harder he held her and the more deeply he penetrated her—the more he longed for someone he could no longer even see in his mind, hear, feel, smell, touch, remember. She was gone. Annihilated. Reduced to desire alone. She was nothing but his longing. Clara. She filled him completely and left no room for anyone but her immaterial being.
Once, as Anna lay in his arms asleep in the afternoon with the shutters over his windows so that the light was dulled to a kind of twilight promise, he reached across her to his bedside table and seized the bundle of his letters returned by Clara. He pressed them to the bottom sheet and trailed them through the moisture from their bodies.
After Anna had left Leipzig, she sent him a box of cigars and a lock of her hair, and so delighted was he with the former that he immediately misplaced the latter and feared it had been swept up and discarded by the woman who cleaned his rooms.
He dedicated to her his Fantasiestücke, taking the title from Hoffmann’s hommage to Jacques Callot, the French engraver whose work inspired Robert in his own, with its mad intensity of detail within a space so confined as to threaten a suffocation of delight. In his letter to Anna accompanying his gift of this piece of music, he drew her attention to the section called “In the Night,” which he wrote with the story in mind of Hero and Leander, of whom he had first learned from his father’s tale of Lord Byron’s famous swim. Hero was a virgin princess of Aphrodite, Leander a beautiful young man who every night guided by the light in her tower swam across the Hellespont to make love to her, until one night a storm blew out her light. Leander, unable to find his w
ay to her, drowned. In the daylight, when she saw his body carried on the waves toward her, she threw herself into the sea and died as near to him as she could.*
*By the time Maria Wodzinska had returned to Poland and sent Chopin the slippers she had embroidered for him (one size too large so he would have room for his warm socks), he had met George Sand, with whom he was to live for many years, the last eight of them chastely. Not two years after they met, Sand carved the date June 19, 1839, into the wall of her bedroom, to mark the last time they had, and would ever, make love. As for Maria, her only response to Chopin’s proposal of marriage was to wed a neighbor boy, whom she divorced for nonconsummation. Chopin never saw her again. He tied her letters together with a dried rose and put them into an envelope on which he wrote, “My sorrow.”
*Robert and Anna never met again. Found among her effects after her death in London in 1904 were Robert’s letters and with them the rose she had carried to his room nearly seventy years before.
Leipzig
AUGUST 13, 1837
I could not do it secretly, so I did it in public.
Clara Wieck
Clara had not completely recovered from her injuries when her father took her off to tour Jena, Weimar, Hamburg, Bremen, Hanover, Brunswick, Freiberg, and finally Berlin, where she was able to spend time with her mother for the first time since her father had repossessed her thirteen years earlier. Clara realized immediately there was a warmth in her mother’s gaze and embrace she could not obtain from her father or stepmother. Therefore, it did not surprise her to discover that her father wrote in her diary of the visit that her mother had proved to be “impolite, cruel, deceitful, petty, and arrogant.”
He ordered Clara, as he had before, to live in Dresden for the summer, to keep her away from any possible contact with Schumann. Robert, however, had no idea where she was; even if he had, he would most likely not have checked once again into his Hotel David. Clara often went out of her way to walk past the hotel and, looking up at its windows, was gripped by a terrible sense of loss combined with the kind of lust she felt had escaped from her forever and that she certainly did not feel for Karl Banck, to whom she knew she was rumored to be engaged to marry, or for any of the men, young and old, who approached her in every city in which she played and as much as offered themselves to her. She was fascinated to find her body responding to a building, whose bricks and wood and glass had no meaning beyond their material selves except for what she gave them by way of memory.
But then her father ordered her back to Leipzig to play a concert at the Börsenhalle. And she, who had played all over northern Germany and been celebrated as a greater virtuoso than Paganini and applauded for so long in Berlin—a full hour and a half—that her back still ached from bowing, refused. She had not played publicly in Leipzig since she and Robert had been apart and she’d returned his letters and had allowed Karl Banck liberties of time if not of flesh with her and had viewed Leipzig as a place in which to hide. There, she felt, she was serving out a kind of exile from desire. To put herself on display, to wrap herself in her music which was at the same time to expose herself, was to place herself in an impossible position. If Robert came to her concert, she would suffer from being in the same room with him; if he did not come, she would suffer from his absence.
When her father told her she must play—the hall was rented, the programs were being set in type, the notion of a triumphant homecoming was firmly planted in the minds of the public—she relented, but only on condition that she be allowed to play several of Robert’s new Symphonic Etudes, which had recently been published and that she had learned—in private, she believed, until her father said, “You show them to great advantage. Play them if you must. I’ll inform the printer.”
But Robert, she learned from mutual acquaintances, did not want her to play them. Her performing them in public would embarrass him and mock the intimacy they had shared and that she had disavowed with her distance from him and her unwillingness to seek him out and her return of his letters.
So she sent him a message of reconciliation that should not have been necessary once she had announced her desire to play his work in public: I want your letters back.
And he replied: You may not have them back. But you may have new ones.
It was as if, now, she must play the concert in order to receive a letter from him. What recompense that would be! How it would infuriate her father to know that by allowing her to play Robert’s music he would have brought them together again, and that she would have traded all the money that her father would take, and covet, from her performance, for that one letter.
When she stepped out onto the Börsenhalle stage to play, she looked for him, in vain.
He sat in the back of the hall, with his face turned away from her, not so she might fail to see him, and not even that he would fail to see her, but because he could not bear the thought that the reunion of their eyes might be shared by the people between them. Their love had become so private a thing, a thing so hidden in himself that he sometimes felt, when he dived within to find it, that he lost himself entirely and was thereby erased not only from the world but also from himself. If to love was to become slightly mad, to lose love was to be wholly touched.
It was only when he heard the piano that he looked toward the stage. There she was, no fog of breath between them now, playing the newly daring young Viennese Henselt’s “Si oiseau j’étais,” to which he had introduced her, sitting there in her usual posture, thoroughly self-contained, no sheets of music to distract her, nothing, it appeared, to distract her, not even himself. He might as well not be there.
It was the same with the Chopin and her Bellini Variations. She wrapped herself in music the way a girl, to protect her virtue, might hold her sleeves down within her palms, in the hope she might cover every inch of flesh but unaware that she had drawn her dress more tightly on her body and thus was all the more revealed.
But when she played a little piece by Liszt and in the middle of it missed a beat, one beat, a momentary lapse he could see went undetected by the audience, it was for him like an eternal moment that lasted long enough for the two of them to enter and be reunited. She never made mistakes like that. She was flawless as a pianist. It had to be she was someone else just then, her double maybe, cracking up in order to provide him inlet to her soul.
There he stayed, and grew, when she played his études, moving from the simple theme he’d taken from Baron von Fricken into perfect resonances of musicians they had loved together, Paganini, Mendelssohn, Bach, the history of their love in music, which of all the arts provided best a cloister of creation shared.
He didn’t care that those around him seemed puzzled by the music. He enjoyed their consternation. The less his art was grasped, the freer he was to write it as he wished. It might be a musician’s job to please an audience; a composer’s was to please himself.
He left as soon as she was done, turned his back to her and did not applaud so as not to vulgarize his pleasure. Love was not meant to be shared, and the expression of it was not meant to be common.
She looked for him as she bowed and did not see him. She had been told he would be there, and had been told, as she rested backstage before the concert, that he was there. But she had not seen him and wondered, as she searched the congratulatory bouquets of flowers dropped at her feet like slain birds, whether he had been there at all.
As soon as she was able to break away from well-wishers and sycophants and the usual young men who had detected personal messages in her phrasings and the way her dress revealed her shoulders, she left the hall alone and walked the streets and then into the woods, suffering far more than the customary letdown after a performance. She wanted to see him there, in her mind if not, as she fantasized, coming toward her from behind the trees among which he used to hide when she was young, jumping out like a ridiculously large forest sprite to startle and amuse her. She saw no trees, no flowers, no meadowland, even as she walked among them and th
rough them. Her eyes were for him alone. Yet not for him at all, because she’d been told she mustn’t see him and had trained herself to see him not at all. He was, as always, wholly with her, and wholly absent.
By the time she arrived home, the bottom of her dress wet with dew and the back of the skirt stained from when she had sat down in the leaves and grass to rest and wait for him who never came, she was convinced she’d made a terrible mistake. She should not have played his music and certainly should not have used it to try to bring him to her. She’d become the siren he had read her of when she was just a little girl, the ocean nymph to match and to destroy his forest sprite, using music to manipulate desire.
She was sitting in despair upon her bed when Nanny knocked and, without waiting for response, entered. Clara thought at first that Nanny’s smile signaled news she’d heard of the supposed success of Clara’s concert. But the smile grew as Nanny handed her a folded sheet of paper and said, “God bless you, child,” as she touched Clara’s cheek and then departed.
The sheet was folded in thirds and sealed. On the outside, in Robert’s unmistakably muddled hand, was a message:
