by J. D. Landis
So many men had loved her when she was young. Clara would play the piano, and the world climbed up her dress. In Vienna they even named a pastry after her, Torte à la Wieck, so they too could eat her. It was described in the Theaterzeitung as an ethereally light confection that flew like an angel into one’s mouth.
But Pauline Viardot went on inspiring such passion, and not simply among the likes of George Sand’s wistful son Maurice. Charles Gounod had loved Pauline. So had Hector Berlioz, but that is to be expected, his heart so easily ripped from his chest and fed to the nearest woman. Harry Heine had probably loved her too, and in the process of mourning her absence from the Opéra Bouffe managed to demean Clara’s even better woman friend, Jenny Lind, who has been heard these days to tell Clara not to be seen so much with Brahms, trying to impose upon her a bourgeois respectability at the very moment she is managing to peel it from herself.
Heine has died. He was the greatest poet of Germany. And one of those Jews, like the Mendelssohns, not so much forced into Christian baptism, since no one held a gun to their heads, as flattered into it. As a genius, would you rather be a Jew and obscure or a Christian and celebrated? Would you rather be reality or a dream? For all the good being a Christian had done him, Robert might as well have been a Jew. Then at least he would have been able to excuse his humiliations (“Are you musical too?”) not to mention decorate with a Jewish star his many New Journal of Music contributions, as Heine’s editors anointed his to the Augsburg Daily. But conversion in that direction was uncommon in Germany. And those Jews who became Christians could not hide even in their genius, not from the genius of others guilty of the same crime. So it was that when Felix Mendelssohn in merely his twentieth year brought J. S. Bach back from the dead upon conducting the St. Matthew Passion from its only existing copy, and he said, “To think that it has been left up to me, a Jewish boy, to revive this greatest of all Christian music,” it remained for Harry Heine to say, “If I had had the luck to be the grandson of Moses Mendelssohn, I would certainly not use my talent to set to music the pissing of the lamb.”
What Robert would set to music, if he could set anything to music now that music appears to be dead to him except for the tediously disturbing hallucinatory notes he hears in his head, would be what Heine wrote at the end of his life:
How slowly time, that horrid snail,
Comes sliding at its snaily pace!
But I, who cannot move at all,
Am stuck here in this endless place.
No glint of sun, no ray of hope
Can pierce this black cell through the gloom.
I know that it will be the grave
For which I’ll trade this gruesome room.
But what Robert had actually set to music in the first of his many settings from Harry Heine, when he began to write songs in his longing for Clara Wieck, was what he sings now to himself, wholly within his head, sixteen years later in his longing for Clara Wieck Schumann:
Waking in the morning,
I ask, Where can she be?
In the evening I lament
She hasn’t come to me.
And finally in the dark of night
With agony I scream
To realize she won’t visit me
Except within a dream.
In his dreams, she plays for him. He sees her at the piano as a child—as she had been as a child—and himself next to her, not as he had been, a wild young man falling slowly in love with a child, but as a child himself. He had remained something of a child, he knew, though marriage and the births of his own children had forced him to assume the demeanor of the stable bourgeois. There were books to keep, money to attempt to make, servants to be hired, bags to be packed for Clara’s tours or for their moves from city to city and, within the cities, from apartment to apartment. But he’d never felt he’d found his way into the center of life itself, or the center of his own life.
She had always played for him—what music she had written, and what he had. And what he had, she played for others. Only she and Liszt, and rarely he. No one else had played what he had written. Mendelssohn had conducted some, but he didn’t play the notes himself. He did not become intimate, as much as Robert admired him, loved him, even; he did not, despite his keyboard virtuosity, dirty his fingers with those same pesty and seductive “musical cantharides” in Robert’s music that Heine had described in Liszt’s.
Chopin did not play him. Moscheles did not play him. Thalberg did not play him. Camilla Pleyel did not play him. Kalkbrenner did not play him. Henselt did not play him. Not even Ludwig Spohr’s wife played him, nor could she; as her husband had informed Robert, she could neither execute nor understand his Symphonic Etudes. Who could blame her? Neither could Clara, though Robert hadn’t told Spohr that. But, referring to her Börsenhalle recital, he had reassured the shaken Clara: You were right to play them only once, and that once for me; they are not suitable for the public; I would be pitiable should I complain that people had not appreciated music that was not intended to win approval but exists, as art must exist, for its own sake.
The first time Liszt came to Leipzig, to give a benefit concert for the Gewandhaus orchestra’s pension fund, he played Robert’s Carnaval.
The audience hated it.
Liszt thought they hated him and refused to leave his room in the Hotel de Bavière. Robert sat with him there, saying hardly a word as Liszt consumed what he explained (as he offered to share with Robert) was his customary breakfast of raw oysters, which he washed down with black coffee he let cool and drank as other men drank beer, glass after glass of it, from morning, he said, until night, an antidote both to liquor and to the ennui that circumfused his mind no matter how extravagantly he played the piano or agitatedly he made love or repeatedly he scattered the ashes of his resurrected self.
Robert felt they had known one another for twenty years. There became no need to talk. Hours went by. Finally, Robert stood up and said, “There! We’ve been speaking with open hearts.”
How Liszt had laughed! He seemed cheered completely out of his dejection and came to Robert and took his arms in his hands—those famed hands! those lightning-flashing, volcanic, Heaven-storming hands! “You are as strange as your music.”
“Thank you.”
“And thank you again for your dedication of your Fantasie. I shall attempt to learn it to bring you honor and me as little shame as possible. It will be, you know, a very difficult piece for the public to digest.”
“I know.”
“Not all your work is thus. You’re not like Wagner—every piece a masterpiece. Or so intended. He writes nothing small, nothing intimate, nothing to indicate the quiet breaths we take between our cries for justice and eternal recognition. Nothing for the chamber; everything for the vault. But you…opaque at one moment, transparent the next. My daughter, Blandine, is but four. She’s like you, perhaps. Very silent, sweetly grave, but philosophically gay. Two or three times a week, I play for her your Kinderscenen. They enchant her completely. And me as well. How can this be?”
“Perhaps I’m like someone who writes books for children and books for adults. The books for children are for the best of children, which means that all children love them. The books for adults are for the best of adults, which means that almost no one loves them. For children, one writes in their language. For adults, one writes in one’s own language. When a language is not understood, it is not the fault of the speaker.”
“I have always considered myself a servant of the public.”
“And you have the public’s love to prove it.”
“And you?”
“Oh, I love you too.”
“No no no no no.” Liszt laughed again. His face was so beautiful, so manly, that it seemed superfluous for him to smile. The very attention he paid was sufficient indication of his concern and even his possible delight. He was one of those fabled seducers who did not choose among his prey. He wanted everyone to love him. Whatever melancholy he suffered was the r
esult both of his success in this and his occasional failure, as in his performance of Robert’s music.
“There is only one person’s love I want,” Robert answered.
A few evenings later she was in attendance, with Robert, at a party the Mendelssohns gave for Liszt.
“I am upset with him,” she said.
“Why?”
“He played your Carnaval as if he were sight-reading it.”
“He was sight-reading it.”
“And not very well.”
“I’m grateful he plays me at all.”
“He doesn’t play you as I do.”
“And I don’t play you as he does,” he replied, touching her bottom through her dress, an almost ensanguined silk that faded to pink at her breasts, where the fabric ended in a pale palette of flesh.
He had thought she’d returned from Vienna, years before, in love with Liszt, so highly had she praised him, so spirited had she become in discussing his attentions. He’d been at first confused by this: Liszt was famed beyond envy, should one desire fame, and beautiful beyond beauty, his face become a work of art and the worship of that art catechized into adoration. But Liszt was his champion. Liszt had written publicly in praise of him and had gone out of his way to play his music—his Sonata and his Novelletten in particular, so that Robert had dedicated his Fantasie to Liszt, out of gratitude and the hope he might choose to perform it as well. To the extent that Liszt played Robert’s music, he embodied Robert. Therefore, if Clara loved Liszt, it was another way of loving him, Robert. We are all mixed together in each other, he determined, and those we love are made love to by the one who makes love to us. And we make love to whomever our beloved loves.
As if to demonstrate the proof of Robert’s theory through an application of its opposite, Clara removed his hand from her bottom while saying, “He doesn’t play me at all.”
Liszt, who had in his hotel room worn nothing more ornate than black pants and boots and an open white shirt, had come to Mendelssohn’s party dressed like a Magyar prince, his colorful waistcoat topped against the March chill by a long, pleated pelisse trimmed at the collar and cuffs with mink. He kept this coat draped over his shoulders until he was persuaded to take to the piano where, in keeping with his outfit, he would play a Hungarian folk song, “prepared especially for you,” he said to Mendelssohn as he removed his gloves finger by finger and then with his pale bare hands placed them on the piano so that they hung lifelessly over its edge like a magic fluted carapace from which all energy has been absorbed.
It seemed a simple tune, barely the sort to which one might picture princes dancing with common damsels by the River Tisza. When he’d finished, Liszt nodded modestly toward Mendelssohn, who raised his hands before his breast as if he might applaud. Before Mendelssohn could bring his hands together, Liszt held up one of his own, tossed his hair so that it rose from his shoulders halfway up his head, and began to play, before his hair had fallen back, a variation on his tune so dramatic in its distension of simplicity that Robert heard a single breath sucked in and bled out from the many people in that room. He also heard the clink and clank of medals worn by Liszt around his neck, as he swayed back and forth on the piano bench, nostrils quivering, lips vellicating, eyes going nearly all the way back in his head, which lent his perpetual smile, directed sweepingly and uninterruptedly at his entire audience now, a rather macabre aspect, though most of the women in the room appeared quite entranced by so maniacal a visage, their excitement growing in direct relation to the proportion of white that showed in those eyes that went right on smiling through a full four variations on the original theme, each more complex than the last.
When he was finally done, Liszt brought his quavering body slowly to rest, closed his eyes, and touched, as had become his habit since its bestowal, the Golden Spur given him by Pope Pius IX. Before recovering his gloves, Liszt kissed the finger that had touched the medal, a gesture Robert realizes should have forewarned him of what he has heard of Liszt’s growing dissatisfaction with the things of this temporal world with which he has been so munificently and unsatisfyingly rewarded.
“Your turn.”
Robert, who was standing with Clara as close as he could get to his dear friend and host, Mendelssohn, feared Liszt was talking to him. All he could think, upon being asked to follow Liszt to the keyboard, was to beg Liszt to kiss his finger now, his poor, damaged digit that had pointed his way to where he was, a composer who could not play his own music.
But it was Mendelssohn who responded: “This evening is for you. Tonight we honor you. I have no plans to play. I have prepared nothing to play.”
“What you are not prepared to play is better than what the rest of us play with preparation,” Liszt graciously averred. “And if you do play,” he added with what was now the gracelessness of a bribe, “I shall pledge to perform once more for your pension fund and for your uncultured, intransigent Leipzigers.”
Though most of those in attendance were precisely the Leipzigers to whom Liszt referred, they were nearly as one in urging their host to give in to the blandishments of his guest of honor.
“Very well,” Mendelssohn addressed Liszt. “I shall play. But you must promise not to become angry with me. As I said, and as may become clear to you in a moment, what I shall play I have not prepared to play.”
Robert was as intrigued by Mendelssohn’s puzzling disclaimer as he was relieved to have discovered that it was not him but Mendelssohn to whom Liszt proposed to turn over the piano. As Liszt rose from the bench, seeming to forget to claim his gloves in his haste to make room for Mendelssohn and to light up one of the nasty Roman cigars he favored over the elegant, fragrant Habanos he could easily have afforded, Robert determined that the only music Mendelssohn might play that he had not prepared to play would have to be improvised. Because anything Mendelssohn had played once, he was prepared to play again.
Mendelssohn sat down. He raised his hands above the keyboard and was about to bring them down when his eyes moved slowly toward Liszt’s gloves hanging over the edge of the piano. He cowered. The gloves intimidated him. Liszt might as well have let his hands themselves remain on the piano. But the gloves were warning enough: Let no pianist follow Liszt to the piano. What piano? As Heine had written of Liszt’s playing, “The piano vanishes…music appears.” The lesson of Thalberg should be sufficient: There was only one pianist in the world. (Then—Princess Belgiojoso had never been granted the privilege of hearing Clara.)*
Mendelssohn did the unthinkable. He reached out toward Liszt’s gloves and touched one of them with the tip of a finger and brought that finger to his lips and kissed it.
Thus did Mendelssohn become Liszt. He smiled broadly. He pushed back the bench to attain the exact angle of Liszt’s attack. He raised his chin. He even tried to toss his hair, but it was thick, dark, Jewish hair and could not wave like Liszt’s, it hardly moved at all, so that Mendelssohn once more postponed his playing by putting a hand behind his neck and moving his hair up and down, up and down, quite like the classicist attempting one of the signal flourishes of the romantics.
Only then did he play.
He played every note Liszt had played. First the simple Hungarian folk song. Then each variation upon it, not only note for note but gesture for gesture. All that was missing were the sound of Liszt’s medals, since Mendelssohn wore nothing more around his neck than a fine cravat, and the undiluted whites of Mendelssohn’s eyes.
When Mendelssohn played the final chord of the fourth variation, he managed somehow to cause Liszt’s gloves to drop off the piano. They grasped one another as they fell and landed palm to palm.
So did Liszt cause his own hands to meet, again and again, clearly appreciative of, and unoffended by, this masterful parody of his every exaggeration and, even more intimidating, the perfect recapitulation of his every dazzling note.
Indeed, when all sat down to the dinner in Liszt’s honor, Liszt could not stop speaking of Mendelssohn’s feat and proclaimed
that Mendelssohn played Liszt better than Liszt played Liszt. Mendelssohn then toasted him and told the story of how, years ago, he and Liszt had been in Paris at the same time and he had shown Liszt the manuscript of his piano concerto and Liszt had taken the manuscript immediately to the piano and played the whole piece through, more beautifully than Mendelssohn had imagined it could have been played and more beautifully than it had been played since by anyone. “It was an absolute miracle,” said Mendelssohn.
“You are the miracle,” said Liszt, who then toasted Mendelssohn.
When he had completed his toast, and all had drunk to their host, who was, without question, the greatest musician among them, Liszt poured more wine from the decanter into his glass, raised high his glass once more, and said, “A toast, as well, to Robert Schumann, as new a friend to me as he is no doubt an old friend to most of you. Of his musical intelligence there can be no doubt—no greater critic writes in any language, or any language I can read. Yet his true and greater genius is to be found not in what he writes of other musicians but in what music he himself writes. I cannot always play it. I cannot always understand it. If for no other reason than those, it must be superior! Let us drink, ladies and gentlemen, to one who says few words and yet expresses himself to a degree that would be shameful in one less gifted and less profound.”
Robert felt himself turn blood red as all about the table glasses were raised by his Leipzig friends and his new friend from Paris by way of Hungary and by the woman next to him, his Clara, in whose loving eyes he felt reborn, so easy was it to find redemption in praise.
But she continued not as happy with Liszt as Robert was. “He did not play Carnaval to your advantage or to my satisfaction.” She rubbed the cuff of his sleeve between her thumb and forefinger, so that her little finger moved against the skin on the back of his hand, splayed around the bottom of his wineglass. “Everything about him is so agitated, so restless. I don’t know how anyone could stand to be around him for very long. He doesn’t make the same impression upon me that he did in Vienna. And look at him—he flirts outrageously. A man who looks like him should not flirt. It’s an insult to the women who are drawn to him against their wills. He seduces the seduced. One might as well hang the dead.”
