Longing

by J. D. Landis

  “Vienna?” Now that the word was out, he took her arm and stopped her from walking, as if he actually believed he was on his way there by foot. “He just wants me out of Leipzig.”

  “Of course he does,” she said with such agreeableness that he felt she somehow represented all that might be good in her father and was able to act as a kind of purifier even of her father’s most duplicitous motives.

  “And you?”

  “And I?” She leaned against him. “They search me, you know. When Dr. Reuter comes, they suspect he has given me a letter from you, and they make me stand with my arms like this”—she moved a step away to show him—“and go through my pockets and she goes through my clothes as I stand there like this, full of anger and humiliation. So, yes, I, too, want you out of Leipzig. But only so that when I leave Leipzig myself I will have someplace to go and someone there to keep me when I arrive.”

  “And have they found any of my letters in their unholy searches?”

  She threw her arms around him. “Not where I have hidden them!”

  Her body shook as he held her. “Are you laughing or crying?”

  “Neither.” She took his arm and pulled him on their way.

  “Are we walking to Vienna?”

  “Only as far as your house.”

  He shook his head. “We cannot go there.”

  “Of course we can.”

  “What about your stepmother?”

  “Oh, I don’t think we should invite her.”

  “Are you making light of my desire?”

  “Are you making light of mine?”

  “You may walk me home. No farther.”

  “I want to come in, Robert. I want to be alone with you. At least for your birthday. I want to lock the door and shutter the windows and hold out my arms like this so you can search me for the message I carry to you.”

  “What does it say?”

  “There is only one way to find out.”

  He shook his head. “If someone sees you coming in, or leaving, or hears you while you’re there, or hears me call for you when you have left, or sees the bruises of your kisses on my neck, or catches in my eyes the reflection of my memory of you, and your father learns that you have been with me, he will turn this Hell he’s made us live in to whatever Hell becomes when Hell becomes too hellish for itself. You know I want you, but I want you so that in my having you, and you me, we hide as little from others as we do from ourselves.”

  “Then we should surely be sent straight to Hell anyway.”

  She argued no further for the satisfaction of her desire but walked him with a kind of resigned merriment to the door of his home, at which his landlady, Frau Devrient, appeared to be standing guard, her arms upon her ample bosom like trees felled by the impish fire in her tiny eyes.

  “She suspects,” whispered Robert.

  “What a shame to have the guilt without the deed,” Clara whispered back.

  He introduced her to Frau Devrient as his fiancée, though the good woman seemed confused and even disappointed when he then kissed Clara chastely good-bye and she went off across the street.

  “Another pianist,” said his landlady.

  “The only pianist.”

  Robert hurried into the house and through the door of his ground-floor flat.

  He went to the window hoping to see Clara as she walked away but instead saw her standing, as he had stood, in a merchant’s doorway, books on shelf displays on either side of her, her eyes searching all the lower windows of his house. She was standing as he had stood, as if waiting for a signal, something from him that might tell her the coast was clear, that they need not hide their love from the world, that their best years need not be spent living without each other.

  He put his hand against the glass. His injured finger ached, as it always did, when he spread his hand open, flat. But the pain was nothing, nothing, compared to the lack of all feeling in the rest of him, the stupor into which desire fell in order to protect his mind from heartbreak.

  His nails scratched the glass as he closed his hand around her as she walked away.

  Vienna

  APRIL 6, 1839

  There is more applause here than music.

  Robert Schumann

  Robert lived in one ground-floor room on Schönlaternegasse. Each time he saw the sign for his street, he was reminded of Clara’s seeing prostitutes for the first time in Paris when she was twelve and imagining herself in one of their rooms in the squalid little houses on the rue de la Vieille Lanterne. Schönlaternegasse was named for the wrought-iron lantern that lit his last steps home on the nights he chased his plum or apple schnapps with the rich Puntigamer beer from Styria, usually at the Silver Swan, where he drank alone and where Beethoven had drunk alone, Robert was told, on that spring night in 1824 after he had conducted the premiere of his Ninth Symphony and went on conducting even when the piece was over, a short, slovenly, long-haired man seen from behind with his arms paring the silence he could no more hear than he could the music, until finally the contralto, Caroline Ungher, grasped his hands in her own and turned him around, with his arms still raised, so he might see the audience, which, with this absolute evidence of Beethoven’s deafness, cheered itself into a state of self-satisfied, tearful compassion, while Beethoven stood there humiliated and longing for the burn of slivowitz down his throat.

  It was themselves they were honoring, not Beethoven. Their pride in him was the pride the ignorant always take in genius; they let someone else discover it, foster it, guard it, fight for it. Finally, when it is safe to proclaim one’s allegiance, they do it not to the work but to the man. Oh, what a genius! they say. Based on what? you ask. Why, his reputation, they say. They may even have a bust of him in their homes. But their beings remain empty of his work. So the case in Vienna, Robert found, where there was perhaps less Beethoven played than in any other city in the world.

  He traveled to the suburb of Heiligenstadt and there purchased a copy of what Beethoven called his Testament. He had written it, for publication after his death, in Heiligenstadt in 1802, upon first realizing he was going deaf. In it, he acknowledged his reputation for behavior that might be considered malevolent, stubborn, misanthropic. Robert imagined Beethoven grasping the handles of Dr. Portius’s psychometer, in order to override this misleading syllabus and reveal the truth about himself: desperate, anguished, blessed, immortal.

  Beethoven called his reputation his “seeming.” You do not know, he wrote to a world that would not read his words until it was too late to make amends, the secret cause of my seeming. I can take no recreation in the society of my fellows, in genteel intercourse, in the shared exchange of ideas. I must live like an exile.

  Robert felt the same.

  He had arrived in early October and spent his first days sightseeing, as if on the trail of music. He went to the Schönbrunn Palace, where Mozart had played piano at the age of six for the Empress Maria Theresa and her husband and exactly half of their sixteen children, though because the performance took place in the Hall of Mirrors, Mozart received the impression he was playing for hundreds if not thousands of formally attired, musically attentive, sets of octuplets, as well as several dozen reproductions of one very fat empress, who delighted in disguising her pregnancies from her subjects by way of so gargantuan a consumption of kugelhupfs that the emperor, Franz, was suspected of wearing the horns not of the cuckold but of the Devil. The empress’s obesity was said to have pullulated out of her unrequited hunger for the castrato Senesino, with whom she sang a duet in Florence when she was twenty-two and he thirty-nine; it was not his subducted body, so ruffly adorned, that attracted her so much as his feminine readiness with tears, which caused him to stop singing and weep, overcome, he explained, by the beauty of her voice. It was on her advice, in fact, that Mozart was to take singing lessons from the castrato Giovanni Manzuoli, who it turned out was not a castrato at all but merely posing as one in order to increase business; like most teachers of voice, he caused more
tears than he shed.

  Following Mozart’s performance, at which he was compelled by imperial command to execute such stunts as to play upon a keyboard draped in black cloth and to improvise a three-voiced fugue with one finger of each hand, Mozart leapt into the expansive lap of the empress and whispered to her that he would one day like to marry her daughter Marie Antoinette, but a few months older than he, who had sat throughout his entire performance with her pretty, doomed head cupped in her palms, her eyes alone moving, following his fingers on the keys and, when it had been summoned, on the black cloth. Mozart was also said to have been taken with one of the portraits of Marie Antoinette, which hung among pictures of her numerous brothers and sisters, though Robert preferred the sculptures by Franz Messerschmidt; not his grand, obsequious rendering in lead of the emperor and empress in their coronation robes but the grotesque faces he was said to have cast after he had gone insane, each of them modeled upon sketches he made of his own face in the mirror, contorted anew each time to match the nuances of his manifest derangement. These heads were like individual variations in a piece of music, a Messerschmidt Fantasie, all coming together in the end to form, as Robert attempted with sound, a likeness of their creator in the throes of ecstatic distraction.

  He walked past the Heaven’s Gate Cloisters, which had given Himmelpfortgasse its name, to the Hungarian Crown Gasthaus, where Schubert had met with his friends to carouse and play their music and where Carl Maria von Weber had lived shortly after the great triumph of Der Freischütz, in which he had virtually invented German romantic opera, and shortly before his death at the age of forty from a consumption that carried in its tormented susurrus a sustained whisper from the nitric acid in which he had indulged as a young man and that Robert felt followed him in the air as he made his way down Himmelpfortgasse to see some of Messerschmidt’s less misshapen scuptures on the façade of the Savoy Institute for Gentlewomen, none of whom were drawn to look out their windows despite his attempt to beckon them with the power of his mind and curiosity.

  At the Café Mozart, which had opened three years after its namesake had received his pauper’s burial in St. Marx’s Cemetery, Robert tried his first Sachertorte.* He ate such more serious (both culinarily and politically) fare as Kalbsbrücken Metternich at the Gasthaus zum Grünen Anker because Schubert was said to have eaten there regularly. Also, Robert discovered, Franz Grillparzer had lived above the restaurant when he was young. Though he did not succeed in meeting Grillparzer, he felt close to him not only because like himself Grillparzer had written a poem about Clara at the piano (and had captured the sensuality of her white fingers, which sometimes at night were the only part of Clara Robert was able to visualize with any clarity)** but because it was the same Count Sedlnitzky, head of the Austrian Bureau of Censors, who told Robert he was unlikely to be able to publish New Journal of Music in Vienna (because he was a foreigner, a Saxon to boot) and who had in the name of the emperor condemned Grillparzer’s poem “Campo Vaccino” and later had banned his play about King Ottocar not because, he said, there was anything wrong with it but because someday it might be determined (given the need for rulers to control not only what people think but what they might have occasion to think in the future) that there had been something wrong with it. “The censor’s job,” Count Sedlnitzky told Grillsparzer, “is to kill at birth any children, regardless of their seeming innocence, who might grow up to cause trouble.”*

  Robert wrote to Clara that he felt he had been banished. Like Beethoven, he found himself unable to take pleasure in communicating with people who did not know the secrets he carried within him: the secret of his music, which for Robert was an expression of a momentary sorrow expanded through art into an imperishable joy, and sometimes the reverse; and the secret of his love, the existence of which he did not hold from proclaiming but the pain of which was so deep and so inexpressible that he wondered if like an aesthetic version of Count Sedlnitzky’s innocent child he had been destined to write music because he had been destined to love hopelessly.

  He found himself, more than ever, withdrawn into a silence whose comfort he distrusted much as he would opium, a soothing relinquishment of life with others for the sad vacancy at the core of his being, which only she could fill. Silence in oneself, he found, begets silence in others. He might go whole days without speaking to anyone, wondering why no one spoke to him. He came to depend on the silence of others—as a respect not so much for his privacy as for his grief—while at the same time he longed to hear words that could be meant only for him, words that addressed him with such specificity they could have been uttered only by some omniscient narrator of being, who is perhaps the true secret listener, or by the one person on earth who could know the depth of his longing. He entertained himself with the idea of sound being transmitted across space as three years before, he remembered, Chopin had entertained him and Clara and Mendelssohn with the idea of sound being captured. It would be painted on air, still, but it would travel great distances, and thus he might, as he lay on his small bed in his room on Schönlaternegasse, hear her voice enter his head and spread through him the dispassion of an opiate and the warmth of her long, white fingers on his flesh.

  Vienna, he decided, where as many people in the streets carried food as in Leipzig carried books, while at the same time no less an authority than the Emperor Franz Joseph himself had proclaimed Don Giovanni “divine” but still “not food for the teeth of my Viennese”…Vienna was a graveyard of imagination and ideas. No wonder, then, that where he felt most at home was in an actual graveyard.

  He wandered through the Währing Cemetery for several days—arriving in the morning and leaving at twilight—before he could bring himself to visit the two graves he had come all this way to see, all this way not only to Währingerstrasse but also to Vienna itself. With the censors opposing his publishing of New Journal of Music and his growing sense that for all its musical fame Vienna was a city that honored music only so long as music did not have to be listened to (it distracted from eating and from the discussion of fornication, something else that was honored so long as it was not actually indulged in), Robert decided he was here to honor the dead.

  As much as he hated funerals, he loved cemeteries. One could never be alone at funerals (except one’s own), whereas there was perhaps no more natural sight in nature than a solitary man wandering among the graves of strangers. Funerals buried the dead; cemeteries presented them in the only possible resurrection, as vividly alive as imagination could make them. At the graves of infants, he saw children dancing. At the graves of couples, he saw fingers entwined. At the graves of the very old, he saw infants crawling from the earth with smiles on their lips and promise in their eyes. He called silently for his lover, from the world within himself, and out of their fragile graves, girls would rise and congregate.

  When he finally allowed himself to approach the graves of Beethoven and Schubert, he found a place he estimated was equidistant between them and lay down on that spot. In case anyone might come upon him, he took from his pocket the notebook in which he wrote ideas and his pen and placed them beside him, like a poet awaiting inspiration. In fact, he was a composer listening with his left ear for Schubert and his right for Beethoven. Hearing nothing, he played their music in his mind, Schubert for his left ear, Beethoven for his right. He chose simple piano melodies—the former’s brief F-minor “Moment musical,” the latter’s variation on Dittersdorf’s “Es war einmal”—and succeeded in keeping them sufficiently separated so that both melodies played at once and he had not only two ears but four hands and, in a sense, two minds, since it was well known that two things cannot be thought at the same time, two sounds cannot be heard at the same time, and certainly two melodies cannot be thought and heard and played at the same time.

  He heard them clearly. That was perhaps the most amazing thing of all. That he could hear each one with such clarity he might as well be split down the middle, half of him Schubert, half Beethoven, all of him dead and bur
ied here between them.

  On Schubert’s stone were carved words written by Grillparzer himself: MUSIC HAS BURIED HERE PRECIOUS TREASURE YET EVEN MORE PRECIOUS PROMISE.

  As if to say, the music being made within the ground surpasses even that released into the air.

  Robert had gone to the opera in Vienna, the ballet, orchestra concerts, three times separately to hear Haydn’s Seasons. But not a note of Schubert had been played. And, the way a dying Mozart had been upstaged by an emperor’s enthronement almost forty years earlier, it had been Schubert’s bad luck that on the evening of the only public concert of his work while he was alive, Paganini was appearing elsewhere in the city, drawing both the public and every last music journalist to him. Schubert’s only expressed disappointment, however, was in being obliged to attend his own concert and thus to miss Paganini’s.

  On Beethoven’s tomb Robert found a pen, a steel pen, forgotten, no doubt, by someone like himself, a distracted worshipper come to see where gods were buried. If it were his pen, he would want it left there, either that he might retrieve it or that in the dead of night Beethoven might emerge and dip its point in the viscid darkness and with it write the music left in him. Robert closed his hand over the pen and slipped it in his pocket.

  He then returned to Schubert’s grave and ran his hands over every inch of the stone, hoping to find a similar omen, and dropped to his knees to feel around in the dirt and grass for something he might take away. There was only the common litter left by men and wind—tobacco, death-crisped leaves, shreds of paper greased by pastry. He put his ear to the ground and heard nothing but the revision of music into silence.* Remembering the night he heard of Schubert’s death, and wept, and woke to find himself embraced by friends who said they feared he’d gone insane from grief, he determined he must look for Schubert elsewhere.**

  He prepared to leave Vienna when it became finally clear the censors would not allow him to publish his magazine and that his music would not support him and Clara in this city, whose preposterous repression and arrogance he attempted to puncture with some carnaval jokes he wrote. In one of the opening allegros he put, as a message both to Clara in Paris and to Metternich in Vienna, a barely disguised version of the “Marseillaise,” which he had also inserted into the masquerade scene in Carnaval. Metternich had banned this song in performances both public and so private as to forbid not only the whistling and humming of it but even the listening to it in one’s own head. Robert chuckled as he wrote this piece but soon was overcome with hallucinations of disaster as he worked upon another, decaying bodies floating before his eyes, rotting coffins carried through the streets by dying mourners. As he found himself weeping for no reason except that a distant voice kept screaming desperately for God right out of the notes as he put them down, he received a letter telling him his brother Eduard was close to death in Zwickau.