by J. D. Landis
It did not help Liszt in Clara’s eyes that he had arrived in Leipzig just in time to rescue her from the aftermath of childbirth, Marie but two months old and Clara restless. As Robert had bestowed upon his wife their first child, Liszt presented her his Hexameron Variations on Bellini’s “Suoni la tromba.” He had written it for two pianos, one to be his, the other hers. So together they played it at the Gewandhaus, overwhelming, on the same program, the premiere of Robert’s own D-Minor Symphony.
“Don’t be sad,” she consoled him, cradling his head in the crook of her arm, as was her custom when he was, or she imagined him, in pain.
“I’m not.”
“Or angry.”
“Only with myself. The winds need work. But I do like that trombone phrase I took from the Schubert symphony. I remember seeing it on the floor of his brother’s apartment and thinking, Nice trombone.”
“Very nice trombone.”
“You tamed him.”
“It’s impossible to tame him. I almost hate Liszt as a composer. And I do hate him as a pianist. His music is a chaos of dissonance that follows the most tiresome introductions. His bass rumbles, his treble clangors.”
“And his eyes…they roll like those of Italian singers who cause one to worry whether artistic passions might give way to some other. And then they go white! I could see this as he played his Lucia Fantasy. But not when he played with you. When he looked at you, his eyes were where his eyes were meant to be. So perhaps you did tame him after all. With you before him, he could not, for once, look only to himself. You should be flattered. And I jealous.”
“Were I flattered, then you might well be jealous. Have you no idea, dear Robert, why he turns up his eyes that way?”
“I thought it was the passion of the moment.”
“It’s passion, all right.” She laughed. “Or his representation of it. He does it for the ladies. It drives them to distraction.”
“It is hardly attractive. It makes him look like a ghoul.”
“It makes him look like a man at the moment of release.”
“Release?”
“Release.”
How would she know, unless she’d seen it in himself?
“Do my eyes…?” he asked.
“Do mine?” she asked back.
From the day they were married and moved into their first home together, at 5 Inselstrasse in Leipzig, he had withdrawn into her, leaving the world behind. What need for the world, when he had her? So accustomed had he become to hiding with her for a night or two—in bedrooms in Dresden, Berlin, Altenburg, Schneeberg—that he is not sure he ever truly accepted the luxury of what would have been her absolutely constant presence had she not begun again to go out on tour. He had so desired to possess her that he’d had no idea how much more he would desire her once he did possess her.
He’d longed for her when they were apart. Once they were together always, and he might satisfy his longing when he wished, his longing only grew. It was a desire not merely to enter her but somehow to envelop her while at the same time to find himself contained, wholly, within her. To confront her flesh was like a confrontation with her music, layer after layer, veils of recondite intoxication, and to lift them one by one was to find revealed something always different from what he had expected. He often could not sleep and did not want to sleep, or at least resisted sleep, hearing music in his head—not yet the music that would torment him—and watching Clara as she slept, placing his face in the way of her breath, studying her closed eyes to read her dreams upon her lids and to feel them in the quickening of her breathing.
It was, he was to learn in time as the father of four daughters, like watching a child sleep. No matter how urgently or cunningly or implacably he and Clara might have made love, her face, in sleep, revealed a renewal of innocence. Indeed, she had been made anew, to him, by marriage itself. He had expected to encounter, suddenly, a woman, a wife, whatever that might be, however tangibly and stalwartly she might assume a posture in his mind and in their home. But as a wife she was, at first, more a girl than she had been as girl. She sat with her legs beneath her, smiling at him for no reason beyond his presence. She wore her hair down even at the piano, as if she meant, in her abandon, to abandon it. She followed him from room to room, from her piano to his, so he was forced either to embrace her or to close the door against her. And still the walls were evilly thin, and he could hear her in the house, her footsteps, her breathing, her fingers in her hair.
Her piano.
Two artists of any kind, in one home, would prove a test, with their selfish hibernations and fragile moods. But when both can be heard, and when the sounds not only interrupt but beckon, the two must love or perish.
Now, when he would give anything to hear her play again, he remembers how he asked her not to play because he could not concentrate. Too often, he confessed in their diary, his songs were bought at the cost of her silence.
But it was Clara herself who urged him toward the symphony. “The piano is too small for you. It limits your fantasy. What you compose for it is orchestral. No wonder people can’t fathom your work. It’s too complex for one instrument.”
He felt like crushing the piano into the floor.
Before a year was out, Marie was born to the late-summer accompaniment of thunder and lightning, sounds that echoed perfectly the symphony, his first, that he had written during a mere four days of her 280 days’ gestation. There was always revision to be done of work written at such heat. But the heat itself was a luxury that nearly matched the ecstasy of music born within its flames. He was almost thirty years old, and married, yet he had lost none of his youthful ability to write for several days and nights on end. He sweated out his ink-cuffed shirts, and burned his eyes with the smoke from his cigars and from the wakefulness he forced upon himself, and felt the music sear the portals of his mind. What joy there was in such fluid, quick creation. How miraculous that it should be matched by the consequence of love.
He had taken Clara in his arms and danced her about the room, the moment she told him she was pregnant. But in their diary the next morning, he saw what she had written: Farewell to the virtuosa.
It was to him she said farewell. He toured with her as far as Hamburg. In Oldenburg, she had been invited to play for the court, without him. It was as if he didn’t exist. Which was to say, it was as if he had produced no work, or no work worth hearing. Most people offered themselves as evidence of their existence, and it was sufficient. An artist, however, was his work. No part of him extruded beyond its boundaries. The work did not merely express the self; it absorbed it. The self, therefore, became the work.
He waited for her in their hotel room. He could neither read books nor write music.
“I’ve become nothing more than your traveling companion,” he said when she’d returned.
“Travel to my arms.”
For the first time, he did not.
“I must return home,” he said.
“And I must not,” she replied.
“I can’t very well ask you to give up your music because I am chained to mine.”
“You may ask.”
“I torture myself with that question.”
“Torture me, then.”
It was added torture even to contemplate such a thing.
“You must go on without me,” he said.
“Yes, I must. We need the money.”
“You sound like your father.”
“We need the money.”
She was right. What he earned from the magazine and from the publication rights to his music and from the interest on his investments was not enough to support them. In order to live together, they would have to separate.
“Where will you go?”
“Copenhagen.”
“Impossible!”
Dearest Robert,
Stupid me. After we parted in Hamburg, I cried all the way to Kiel. I was so distraught at being apart from you I could not take the stage. So of course I wa
s forced to pay the theater owner what expenses he had incurred on behalf of such a lovesick coward as myself. To think that I left you in order to make money and lost money as a result of having left you.
And then—here is one reason you have not heard from me in so long—a storm came up and postponed for a week the boat to Copenhagen. Having humiliated myself in Kiel, I went to Lübeck and offered my services, which, to my subsequent regret, were accepted. I played, but no one knew I was to play, because there was no time to advertise. But even if there had been time, I would probably have attracted no more of an audience. It turned out that all of Lübeck went to see a visiting opera company that evening. And how can a lonely pianist playing her husband’s brilliant music compete against a cackling group of costumed cantatrici? Again, I had to pay out more money than I took in.
And so I returned to Hamburg, weeping all the way because it was where I had last seen you and I would see you this time only in my mind. But it turned out I had forgotten how close it was to Easter. What music people wanted was not the kind I make or you write. But at least I learned this before I’d indebted myself beyond the wasted travel expenses.
Back to Kiel it was with me, poorer, tireder, hungrier for you for all the bouncing of the coaches. The storm had passed, except within myself. As I sailed for Copenhagen, I cried out for you, and for Marie. It was, as you know, my first time at sea. I was convinced I had for the last time touched land.
But here I am, safely in Copenhagen and so busy (particularly in comparison with dreary northern Germany) that I must offer such constant engagement as the other reason why you have not heard from me in so long.
I have performed many times and have been, or will be, paid for all except of course my appearances for charity, which, as you have always said, are profitable for the music if not necessarily for the musician. As enthusiastic as the Copenhageners may be to hear me play, they are musically unrefined. (Which is my kind way of saying they are ignorant.) I was able to play your music but once. You are in good company: they are resistant even to Chopin.
The Queen herself took me into her winter garden and cut some flowers for me. She did not kneel but bent at the waist. I had never thought to see a queen in quite that posture. It did not make me envy her throne.
As a visiting artist of what the Danish at least consider world renown, I have been taken up by Johan Heiberg. He seems to be the most famous critic and playwright (both!) in Denmark and is married to an actress who is said to look so much like me that the newspapers here have remarked on our similarity. Since she is held to be among the most beautiful women in Denmark, you can see how such fame as my own creates its own illusions. Our features are similar, and we have the same figure (I trust you are picturing mine and not imagining hers), but she is most certainly pretty, and I am most certainly not.
Herr Heiberg has made certain I’ve viewed the sculpture of Thorwaldsen, many of whose pieces are indeed the equal of his bust of Schiller so beloved by you. And he has taken the trouble to introduce me to a philosopher named Søren Kierkegaard, who has been championed by Heiberg and might be termed his disciple did not Kierkegaard display such independence in thought and attitude. Heiberg warns me of Kierkegaard’s melancholy. But every time we sit down together, Kierkegaard talks to me with great cheerfulness in his eyes, as much inflamed by the expression of ideas as you by the creation of music. It is as if my girlish wish has finally come true and I am sitting in a café with Gérard de Nerval. All that is missing is yourself. You are but two years older than Kierkegaard and even closer than that in temperament. He writes about such matters as the irony of Socrates and the conflict between hedonism and ethics while using pseudonyms like (do not be envious, Florestan!) Johannes Climacus (which certainly suggests hedonism to an innocent girl like me). He asks my advice about marriage—giftermal in Danish, he teaches me, so that I say, “What a beautiful word!” and he says, “Gift means ‘poison.’” Nonetheless, he calls marriage the deepest form of revelation. I told him, “You have no idea how much there is that is revealed.” He laughed. Is there any greater pleasure, at least in conversation, than causing a philosopher to laugh? “Shall I be a husband or a priest?” he wants to know. Everything with him is a choice between incompatibles. (He is writing a book called Either/Or!) So I answer his question: “Both.” This causes him to laugh even harder. “‘Both!’” he repeats. Then, with a revelation of his own, he screams, “Neither!” So I suggest he call his new book instead, Neither/Both. This time he did not laugh.
But my favorite person in Copenhagen is Hans Andersen. When he and I were first introduced, I told him of our mutual admiration for is work. Never have I seen such genuine delight in an artist praised! He became quite beautiful at that moment. I put it that way because, Robert, Hans Christian Andersen is possibly the ugliest man ever born! It is not merely his face, which is long and narrow and sunken and frettingly dark beneath eyes as cold and small as mice droppings in the snow (crowned by a forehead from which the hair is in retreat and gathers at his ears like furry fists). His entire body is so long and thin that he reminds me of the creaking mast on the ship that brought me here. (And yet it’s as if God had made him so inhumanly tall so that his face would be as far as possible from incredulous eyes, particularly those of the children he so dearly loves and honors with his fairy tales.)
Well, I discovered soon enough the reason for his transformation at my modest (but sincere!) compliment. His work is hated here! Like you, he is a prophet who goes unhonored in his own country. He did not tell me this himself, but I first gathered as much from my very protector himself, Johan Heiberg, who one day began to attack Herr Andersen mercilessly. Not to his poor, suffering face. To me alone. But then I learned that Herr Heiberg had said the same things in print. And why? Because Andersen has found a way to tell the truth, the absolute truth. And he tells it in tales that even children can understand. He is seen as one who corrupts an entire society by stripping it of its illusions.
One day we were discussing “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” I had a sudden insight and inquired if perhaps he had been influenced by Ludwig Tieck’s “Puss in Boots.” From his reaction, you might have thought I had achieved with one remark the genius as a critic that you have displayed in ten thousand such percipiences. You would have been so proud of me! He said I was the first person ever to have noticed what had indeed held profound sway over his creation. Fearless in my new role as interpreter of literary subtlety (yet how easier to construe writings than music, which makes me admire you all the more), I then asked him if this same “Emperor’s New Clothes” might happen to be about Johan Heiberg himself: “Whatever Heiberg says, no matter how ridiculous, everyone believes,” I ventured with the naive confidence of a tourist who believes she comprehends an ancient city after one day among its ruins. Yet so delighted was Herr Andersen at my apparent insight into his fable about the power of critics that he seemed about to hug me. Given the extreme disparity in our heights, this might very well have made me intimate with a part of him I would prefer neither to know nor speculate upon. But it turned out I mistook this awkward man’s attempt to bow with the beginnings of an encirclement of my own dear little body. It was his respect with which he honored me. That and his willingness to listen to me talk about you. And so he knows you now not as critic but as artist.
And I…I cannot wait to remove my emperor’s old clothes and know you even better, if such may prove possible about someone known and loved so well by…
Your Zilia
“Critics are to art as shit is to food,” is the first thing Robert remembers having said to Hans Christian Andersen, who had neither sarcasm nor cynicism to add to Robert’s vulgar condemnation of the community of critics from which Robert himself had withdrawn in having recently resigned from his magazine. But Andersen’s agreement with the sentiment was apparent in his virtual exile from the country where he had written his greatest work and received his greatest censure.
By the time Andersen visi
ted them in Leipzig, Robert had written songs to four of Andersen’s poems, which Livia Frege sang, with Clara accompanying. “I cannot believe you would honor me in this way.” Andersen had tears in his eyes. He did not seem homely to Robert. Men never did. They were either beautiful, like Ludwig Schunke, or they were simply men, wearing their bodies as they might an unremarkable suit of clothes.
“In honoring you, I honor my wife. It is you who inspires her, and she who inspires me. The two of you dwell together in these songs. Everything I write, I write out of love for her.”
By such sentiment was Andersen himself inspired to confess his own love. It was for Jenny Lind, whose name Robert was then hearing for the first time. She was a singer, and she had come to Copenhagen to perform as Alice in Robert le Diable. What a strange coincidence, thought Robert, as Andersen spoke to him in their corner of the parlor, over brandy and cigars, that this should be the same opera about which Clara had written him from Paris so many years ago, when she was away from him for longer than she’d ever been and he missed her for the first of what he did not know would be countless times for countless hours, and he desired her, desired her for the first time, in her absence, as he desires her now, even as he lies within Endenich, in her absence.
“She showed me art in its sanctity,” said Andersen.
Robert thought Andersen was referring to Clara until he mentioned her voice, Lind’s voice, which was renowned for its expression of chaste maidenhood and which, in Franz Grillparzer’s words, rose out of time and space to become the purity of an inculpable soul singing.
“I felt I had seen one of the vestal virgins,” said Andersen.
