Longing

by J. D. Landis

  After endless days of silence, of pain, of hope, of despair, may these words be received with the love that you once felt for me. If you no longer feel it, please return this letter unopened.

  If tears could have broken that seal, it would have melted as they fell upon that letter and her fingers that but hours before had let him hear his études for the first time.

  The 13th of August, 1837

  My dearest Clara,

  As you have broken the seal on this letter, so you have repaired my heart. That your eyes might see my words is, to me, after such long silence, as if they were gazing into my own. I can feel you with me even as I sit alone at my desk, imagining this letter in your hands, your breath upon it, your eyes alight, the very scent of you spreading over it and me.

  Have you been faithful? As much as I believe in you, my desire for you is restless and perverse. When nothing is heard for so long from the one I love most in the world—and that is who you are—I lose faith in your strength of will and by so doing in my own.

  The fidelity I speak of is not to me but to us. One may give oneself to another without, as it were, taking the other to oneself. What I have learned in our time apart, which is a year and a half nearly to the day, is that we are inseparable, no matter how much time or space is put between us, but that, inseparable or not, we cannot survive in separation.

  Therefore, will you promise me that on your birthday one month from now you will give your father a letter from me? He would not have put my études in your program were he not somehow disposed toward me. Say you will. Say “yes” to me. I will not rest until I have your vow.

  My heart lies on this page. And now my name.

  Robert Schumann

  Leipzig August 15, 1837

  My Robert,

  A simple “yes” is all you want? I have spent my whole life saying “yes” to you, whether you have heard it or not.

  As for if I have been faithful, I cannot say “yes” to that. I have betrayed you with my tears, which should have been laughter for our time together and the love we made. I have betrayed you with my dreams, which failed to make real their ecstasy. I have betrayed you with my words, whispered to you every night too softly for you to hear. I have betrayed you with my body, which I have yielded time and time again to memory. I have betrayed you with desire, which has used you in your absence as if you were upon me. I have betrayed you with no man, who is yourself when you are gone from me.

  I would say “yes” were you to ask me to cut off my hands and send them with your music pouring forth. But when you ask me to give a letter to my father, begging of him whatever it is you might beg (and if it is not me, then do not break the seal on this letter), that strikes me as risky.

  It is one thing for him to allow your music played in public by me—he seems to respect your music, at least so long as everyone else finds it incomprehensible. But your person—so long as I find it desirable, which will be for as long as I live, he…I cannot bear to write the words.

  But of course I shall give him your letter. If only to be able to say “yes” to you in the one way I may right now.

  Your Clara

  P.S. It is actually the 14th on which I am writing this letter, but out of fear that you will not receive it until tomorrow, I am putting tomorrow’s date upon it, so that we may at least have the illusion that we are somehow together on this day, whichever day it may be, today, tomorrow, even yesterday. Time has been our enemy, in that it provides a measurement of our isolation; in this way we may vanquish it.

  The 13th of September, 1837

  Dear Herr Wieck:

  On your daughter’s birthday—the day on which the most cherished being on earth for each of us first heard the breathing of this earth—I write to you for your blessing.

  Of your regard for her, there can be no doubt. Her music sounds it to the world.

  Of your regard for me, I believe we are both undeserving of it—you for holding it, I for having it held against me.

  I know you like my music, quite against the prejudices of the world at large. But why, then, honoring its complexities, can you not honor the complexities in its creator? I know my faults well enough not to have to repeat them to someone who himself has repeated them to anyone who will listen.

  But what of my virtues? I work almost endlessly at my music, and what time I might take away from it to spend with your daughter would be time spent happily—I might say relievedly—away from my art, which can only benefit from the happiness she would bring to it and me. (I am not one of those who believes that great suffering produces great art; great suffering produces great lives, except for those who live them.)

  I have been left an inheritance by both my poor departed father and mother, so that even if the publication of my compositions does not produce great income for some time, I shall be able to take care of your daughter.

  I have known your daughter since her childhood. I have watched her and watched over her and have grown to love her now as a man as once I loved her as a charmed visitor to her sweet and wholesome life, which you provided her and that now I ask your blessing so I might do the same.

  I beg of you, be a friend again to one to whose friendship you entrusted your child, and in so doing be the best of fathers to the best of daughters.

  Robert Schumann

  Leipzig

  SEPTEMBER 17, 1837

  If I should give my daughter in marriage to another man,

  it would be to keep her from you.

  Friedrich Wieck

  To prepare for his interview with the man he desired as his father-in-law only insofar as that man had fathered the woman he loved, Robert spent the night denying himself both sleep and drink, the former because of his mind’s rehearsal for the great event, the latter only through the most profound act of will.

  And so when, almost immediately upon his arrival at the Wieck home, Wieck offered Robert a sherry, as he was pouring one for himself, Robert accepted, grateful for what he took to be the acknowledgment of his nervousness and Wieck’s consequent wish to put him at his ease.

  They were meeting in a small parlor of the Grimmaischestrasse house within which Robert had never set foot. It was furnished only with a single chair and table and, against one wall, a closed cupboard. He had not even known of this room’s existence, nor noticed the narrow, unglassed door that opened into it. He found this rather unsettling, because he had, after all, lived in this house and had, he thought, investigated every inch of it, not only out of curiosity but also, once he became aware of his attraction toward Clara, because he believed that those we desire leave desire in every room through which they pass in life, emanations of the shadow self that attach to objects and suffuse the very air.

  But he could not feel her in this room. In the house at large, yes. He had had only to enter the front door, to come into this home from which he had been exiled for so long, to feel both her presence and his desire for her. He had no idea if she was even at home. He had rehearsed her running down the stairs to greet him, as she had often done as a child, and in one mad version of this as-yet-unlived day she had taken him by the hand and pulled him up the stairs all the way to her room on the third floor. But reality had hidden her away. And now this strange, hitherto unseen parlor had erased her from the house. She, too, had never stepped within, or Robert would know. Her father had found the one place in the house where she could not comfort him nor he covet her.

  The fireplace was filled with wood but unlit. While it might be too soon in the season for a fire, with summer gasping its last, cool breaths, this room was chill, as well it might be, given its ghostly nonexistence until now. All the more reason for the warmth of the sherry.

  Wieck even offered him a cigar, which was sufficiently unlike him that Robert wondered if his letter might have done the trick entire and Wieck was merely going to raise his glass in a toast and, bypassing this dreaded interview entirely, pronounce his blessing upon the union of his daughter and the only man who lo
ved her more than he did.

  “Habano?” Robert let the smoke drift out of his mouth and into his nostrils, which is what a male human being did to show his appreciation for the gift of a cigar, and as further demonstration of his gratitude he also waggled the glistening brown cylinder of tobacco gently between his first two fingers, making sure Wieck could observe the gesture.

  “Caribbean,” answered Wieck. “That’s all I know about it. If there’s anything I can’t bear, it’s a cigar pedant.”

  “I was merely—”

  “How is the sherry?”

  “Oh, very good.” Robert could not help himself, he now waggled his little glass before Wieck.

  “You drink too much.” Wieck punctuated his judgment with a long swallow from his own sherry glass, immediately refilling it from the decanter. When he moved to top off Robert’s glass, Robert did not know whether to hide it behind his back or hold it forth in defiance of Wieck’s reproof. It seemed safest to imitate Wieck himself; Robert brought the little glass to his lips, slowly raised his head, and drank down the sherry, Wieck be damned.

  “More?” Wieck held out the decanter.

  “I drink too much.” Robert, smiling confidently, could not help mocking his inquisitor.

  “I’m glad to hear you admit it. It’s one more reason why you must not marry my daughter.”

  Robert took the decanter from his hand and poured his own drink. “Are you denying us your permission, Friedrich?”

  “Have you heard me deny you my permission, Herr Schumann?”

  “No, I have not.” Robert became nervously optimistic. “May I assume we then have your permission?”

  “You may assume anything you want. Assumptions are the very fodder of misconception. For example, suppose I were to assume you have enough money to support my daughter in the style in which I support her. Let us say an income of a thousand thalers. Would that not be a misconception?”

  “Yes, it would.”

  “Aha!” Wieck waved his cigar with such heartiness that its ash flew off and landed whole and corklike—the sign of a good cigar indeed—on Robert’s sleeve. Robert was afraid of offending Wieck by brushing it off either onto the floor or into the fireplace or the ashtray on the mantlepiece. So he held his arm out rigidly before him, balancing the ash thereon, as he proceeded to offend Wieck far more grievously than he would have done had he taken a deep breath and blown the ash directly onto Wieck’s cravat.

  “The misconception is that you support her. If I am not mistaken, it is the money she makes from her concerts and recitals that you keep and spend.”

  Wieck turned his back and walked away. Only when he reached a wall did he turn around. He pushed his cigar almost punishingly between his lips and sucked on it again and again until his cheeks swelled and only then did he release a huge cloud of smoke toward Robert. Wieck’s words seemed to Robert to percolate out of that smoke as the Devil’s might out of the steam of Hell.

  “Unless you’ve had a child with one of those whores of yours, you have no idea what it means to be responsible for the life of another. She is my daughter. She is not even my only daughter. Nor my son or only son. But she is the child dearest to me and the one who costs me most—my time, my dreams, the sharing of my knowledge, which I tried to share with you, to transfer from my head and my heart to your hands, only to have you disdain me by crippling your hands. Hands, yes. A pianist has but one hand, divided in two. We speak of hands, but each hand is, literally, the other hand. So it is with Clara and me. We are one hand. Injure one of us, and the other is destroyed. She is my treasure, and I am her bank. I put her share away for her within. In the meantime, room and board. If you want a metaphor for life—you with all your books and the foolish magazine articles you write in which you pretend to be two people,* as if you were your own two hands—then there it is, the metaphor for life itself: room and board.”

  “She can live with me free,” Robert ventured, attempting to bring Wieck back to the topic at hand.

  Wieck returned from across the room. Robert could not tell if he came for the conversation or the sherry. “I see you’re using your sleeve as an ashtray,” Wieck observed. “There might be the metaphor for yourself: the man who makes a mess of himself for others to clean up.”

  “This is your ash,” Robert informed him. “And I can clean it up myself.” He shook his sleeve toward the fireplace. The ash remained intact when it hit the hearth. Then what must have been a wind through the flue blew the ash back toward Robert and onto the rug before the hearth, where it disintegrated.

  “She cannot live with a man who drops his ashes on the floor. Imagine what her life would be like. Children running about. Noise. You playing the piano. She playing the piano. No money. The world shrunk down into your tiny rooms in your tiny house somewhere. The world must be her world, as it is now. She is wanted everywhere. We are leaving soon for Dresden, Prague, Vienna…Vienna! I cannot let you enslave her.”

  “Enslave! I want to marry her, not—”

  Wieck held up his hand. “It’s the same thing. Marriage is enslavement.”

  “Are you enslaved then?”

  “I? Oh, no. Not I. But my wife is.” Wieck began to laugh. “My wife certainly is.”

  “And your daughter?”

  “My daughter is free.”

  “I’m glad to hear you say that. If she’s free, then she’s free to marry.”

  “Free of you,” Wieck said. “Free of you.”

  Robert shook his head and sat down in a chair that faced the cold fireplace.

  “Herr Wieck, I am a young man of twenty-seven with a restless mind. I am an artist who thrives upon some expression of the world within my being. And yet for eight years I have not set foot out of Saxony. I have remained here, working ever harder on my compositions, falling ever more in love with your daughter, saving my money for what I have known for some time is the life I plan for us to have together. Can it be that all my industry and the austerity to which I have confined my life are lost upon you? Is there nothing about me that would recommend me to yourself and for your daughter?”

  Wieck came and stood before him. “Your new études,” he said. “Did you think I wouldn’t know that if I let her play them at the Börsenhalle they would bring you two together? It was inevitable.”

  “Then why…”

  “I understand you, Schumann. I understand you, and my daughter understands your music. We are together in our understanding of you. But if you come between us, then nobody will understand you. Why can’t you leave us all as we are?”

  “Because I want her.”

  “You cannot have her.”

  “Will nothing change your mind?”

  “Nothing. More sherry?”

  Robert took his glass from the table and held it out toward Wieck, who filled it. “Do you know what a privilege it is for me to have let you in this room? This is my gun room. I keep my pistol in that cupboard. Except, of course, when Clara and I are traveling. It is my job to protect her.”

  “Are you going to shoot me?” asked Robert.

  Wieck gestured for Robert to stand up. When Robert was on his feet, Wieck put his glass into his hand and then picked up his own and held it out toward Robert. “A toast. To Clara—alone.”

  His words were like a knife, thrust hilt and all into Robert’s heart.

  *Wieck was referring to Schumann’s going by the names, and sometimes even assuming the characters, of Florestan and Eusebius. Florestan was the hero of Beethoven’s Fidelio, rescued from certain death in a dungeon by his wife, who was disguised as Fidelio, a man. Eusebius had been a much-persecuted fourth-century Christian priest, and eventually saint. Florestan, at least as embodied by Schumann, was wild, impulsive, even dissolute; Eusebius, gentle, contemplative, abstemious. Schumann did not so much outgrow them as grow beyond them. But while they lasted, they satisfied his desire, shared by so many of his artistic contemporaries, for that elusive double (or, in his case, double double) who, like a parallel un
iverse, may both share and appease the anguish of existence and the equivocacy of art.

  Vienna

  APRIL 11, 1838

  These visits from my adorers are more than I can bear.

  Clara Wieck

  Clara was sitting by the open window in her room overlooking the Sonnenfelsgasse, reading the latest of Robert’s letters to be smuggled to her, when as though from the sky there fell upon the letter, and from there onto her lap, a small, stiff piece of paper.

  She knew it could not have come from Robert’s letter; she was reading that letter now for the third time. Robert’s letter was addressed, as had been the inner envelope in which it arrived, to Fräulein Entfernt, yet another invented “pseudofundonym” (as he called them) Robert used in case her father might intercept, or come upon, one of his letters. But what, she wondered, would her father make of a letter addressed to a Miss Faraway? How could he not know that it was she, and that her correspondent was the one who shared the torture of the distance between them? Robert must either be insulting or entreating him with the very transparency of the ruse.

  Her own name and address on the outer envelope had been written by one or another of Robert’s accomplices, most often Dr. Reuter, to hide Robert’s own handwriting from her father, who would recognize it instantly and use the occasion both to confiscate the letter and to claim that Robert’s terrible penmanship was further evidence of his lack of fitness to be her husband.

  The small piece of paper was blank, at least on the side that faced her. Clearly, it was a calling card. While its method of arrival through the open window was unorthodox, she feared it was from another of the seemingly thousands of strangers who, since her arrival in Vienna over six months ago and her triumphant recitals here, wanted now to meet her, either that she might endorse some business of theirs or that they might bathe in or drink in whatever glory they imagined poured forth from her. She had become a prisoner in her own house, unable to walk the streets for fear of being surrounded, stared at, touched, stripped, torn apart, eaten—whatever people might be driven to do to her or with her by the very fame that was, they believed, their gift to her. This was not even in exchange for her gift: Such adoration, such annihilation, came as much from those who had merely heard of her as from those who had heard her. Fame, she had discovered, soon becomes divorced from its source, in her case music, the piano, her interpretation of the former and her effect upon the latter. Fame was now attached to her, like skin on beauty. It rendered her both wholly distant and wholly, delectably, devourable. Merely the anticipation of her presence caused mayhem; if it were announced, even erroneously, that she was to perform at the Redoutensaal or the Musikvereinsaal or the Burgtheater or the even larger Winterreitschule, the last two of which held thousands, thousands more than they could ever hold would overrun the box office so the police had to be summoned to turn them away. When her father reported to her with delight that masses of people were seen weeping, he did not seem to question, as she did, whether it was truly because they had been denied tickets for her performance or rather as a result of having been beaten by the truncheons of Metternich’s police and trampled by their horses.