by J. D. Landis
He might, Robert knew, have stopped speaking right there. But driven by what Robert was soon to comprehend was Andersen’s need to confess the humiliation of failure (in words of such graceful simplicity that the beauty of the tale itself triumphed over the brutality of its contents), he went on to tell the story of his tragic love.
He had loved Jenny Lind from afar. He had worked up the courage to meet her. He had played upon his reputation (in the rest of the world if not in Denmark) to impress her. He had given her signed copies of his work. He had written new work for her, including “The Ugly Duckling” and “The Nightingale”—a tale for each of them. He had followed her wherever she went, first in Copenhagen, then on the Continent. He had proclaimed his love with everything he did and everything he wrote and everything he thought and everything he said except for the words themselves, which he could not say to her, she was too precious for him to wound with words that might offend her ears.
One day, in one of her hotel rooms, where he continued to pretend he was merely a friend who happened to appear in her life out of nowhere and to write such stories for her as would secure immortality for one who, like any musician, would be reduced by death to the mere hearsay of reputation…”One day,” he leaned over and down and whispered to Robert, “she interrupted whatever words I was spouting in order to hide the words I felt I would have died to say and died if I failed to say. She interrupted not with words of her own but with a gesture. She held out her hand to me, as I had always hoped she might. But I could not have grasped it even had I dared, for in it was a mirror. ‘Look at yourself,’ she said. ‘I prefer to look at you,’ I found the courage to say and gazed beyond the mirror at her face as if it were my own reflected back at me. ‘Look at yourself,’ she repeated, not impatiently, ‘and only then look at me.’ I looked at my face. What is a face, after all? It is the only mask that’s not a work of art. But it was as if I had never seen myself before. In order to show me the impossibility of my love for her, she allowed me to possess her for the first time. Her eyes alone, it is true. But they became my eyes. I saw myself as she saw me. ‘Now look at me,’ she said—‘see me for what I am: as ugly inside as you are outside.’ I looked, of course. I knew it was the last time I would ever see her. (But of course it was not.) Never had she been more beautiful. Her cruelty itself had transformed her. To the degree she made me hate myself, she made me love her all the more.”
Strange how all these loves connect. Music seems to thread them through the air itself, entangling people against their wills and judgment. Where music was involved, love went wild. It replaced language. It sped through the blood like the Spanish fly that Heine found in Liszt but was far more deeply hidden in Mendelssohn and took a Jenny Lind to animate.
It was Mendelssohn who brought The Lind, as Clara came to call her, into their lives. Clara asked Mendelssohn to obtain tickets for a Lind recital in Leipzig, no small task even for him, who was the city’s most renowned musician and most powerful musical politician and was to play that night on Lind’s program. Nonetheless, he was, he told Clara, nearly torn apart in securing the tickets. People who had no interest in music, in song, in sopranos, in Swedes, in women, in beauty, in art, in truth, in going out of an April evening—people who had interest in nothing but what other people were interested in created an almost deadly crush in their desire not to hear Lind make music but to be in that place where she did so.
For his courage, Mendelssohn demanded something in return: When Clara arrived from Dresden, he told her he wanted her to play at Lind’s recital that night. “But I’ve brought no concert clothes,” she said. “Jenny won’t mind,” he replied. “Of course she won’t mind—how little you know of women, Felix!” He laughed in agreement: “Cécile has taken all I know and applied it to herself.”
That evening, when he had finished playing Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, Mendelssohn left the stage, walked into the audience, found Clara, and walked her back to the stage, where she played two of his Songs without Words. The audience, despite its impatience for the appearance of Jenny Lind, seemed to delight in Clara’s brief return to the city of her birth and her first fame and the great scandal of her love.
It was Clara who then declared to fall in love with Jenny Lind, and not only with the most beautiful coloratura she had ever heard but with a woman of almost peculiar restraint in an art in which exaggeration of gesture, voice, and attitude was customarily rewarded. She was a small thing, dressed almost as simply in her concert clothes as Clara was in one of her traveling outfits. At the reception following the concert, the two women stood off by themselves for a time, unapproachable somehow, not because each was perhaps the most famed practitioner of her art in all the world but because two women who were precisely that were able to huddle together like sisters in possession of the most tender and secret of memories. Only Mendelssohn was able to come between them.
Clara could, she said later, observe the very first spark of the love between Jenny and Mendelssohn, passing through her as they stood on either side of her. It was her they toasted, for lending her fame and virtuosity to their concert; themselves they celebrated. Adultery’s early pretense is the taking of pleasure in another for the purpose of diverting attention from oneself. How Jenny and Felix fussed over her and, together, touched their glasses to hers and touched her themselves—her hands, her bare arms beneath the sleeve, even her hair—her body not so much a barrier between them as a conductor of their implicit passion.
It aroused her even, as she exhibited upon her return to Dresden, when she told Robert of her suspicions. In the telling, she became almost hoarse with lust, thick-voiced as she acted out their parts and touched Robert as she had been touched by them. More than with their absence from one another, which always brought them to uncommon ardor, Clara’s assumption of the role of these new lovers, and Robert’s delight in playing both audience and participant, opened her to what he could only believe was a new experience. In the sixth year of their marriage, she learned for the first time to find a depth of feeling in her own body through a brief conviction that it had become the body of another, as so, too, had his. She became, that night, quite lost to herself. And so he gained yet more of the only woman he had ever loved.
Clara did not judge the others then, merely portrayed them. The time had not yet come, he realizes, for her to shrink within herself, and thereby to shrink her feelings, out of a bitterness whose by-product was almost always envy. And envy’s harvest was, in turn, a condemnation of any pleasure taken by others less afflicted by the world. Her pain was his, his pain hers, which is to say, it has been his suffering alone that has caused hers. Her love for him has destroyed the love she had for others and the joy she took in all they did.
What she would not condemn in Jenny, now Jenny condemns in her. Johannes has redeemed her. And him as well. And all Jenny is heard to say is it is shameful Clara be seen with him so much, at all.
Jenny was seen everywhere with Mendelssohn, even in his home. She had no shame before Cécile. Indeed, her admiration for Mendelssohn himself seemed to extend to his wife. Jenny did not hate Cécile; she merely wanted to become her. Cécile, for her part, seemed to take no pleasure in the attention Jenny paid to her. Nor in the fact that she was far more beautiful than Jenny, her skin darker, her hair fuller, her eyes as blue, her nose at least as small and unobtrusively shapely, her bosom capable of bringing, in the deliberately oafish equivoque of one of her Berlin admirers, men’s eyes to their knees. What Jenny wanted, Cécile knew, was her life: the home that sang with children; the children who took her out of reach; the excuse to stay put; the husband who was not just any husband but the man with whom she had found herself in love.
The home Jenny envied imprisoned Cécile, who, unlike Robert, was not invited to accompany the musician in the family on tour. So Cécile remained behind while Felix traveled Europe, no small part of it with Jenny, though always, as they say, on business. It was perfectly natural for him to invite her to sing in Aac
hen at the Lower Rhenish Music Festival; he was the conductor, after all, and there could be no harm in his looking into her eyes and encompassing her small form within his quivering palms and stroking from her throat “A new created world, a new created world springs up, springs up…” Haydn’s second up rose upon the F-sharp Felix loved so much to hear in Jenny’s voice he put it repeatedly for her to sing in his own Elijah’s opening bars of “Hear ye, Israel.”
So much did the two of them enjoy making music upon the banks of the Rhine that they took two trips down the river itself, on one of which they stood for hours before the Virgin Mary portal on the cathedral of Cologne, watching her life unfold in relief before them, and on the second of which they celebrated more secular pleasure through a visit to Beethoven’s birthplace in Bonn, at 20 Bonngasse. But Mendelssohn did not take Jenny to the Beethoven monument in the Münsterplatz, the financing of which he had opposed on principle, believing that money should go first to living orchestras before it was spent on what he called “lumps of stone.”
Robert had Brahms walk him to the monument on one of Johannes’s first visits to Endenich. He had still wanted to live, then, to eat and drink and smoke and hear music and make music and to dream, at least, of returning to the home in which Clara lived and their children lived and dear, generous Johannes lived with them. He had not yet begun to starve himself. His feet had not yet begun to swell from the ministrations of the young temptress named Edema. Indeed, he was as able to keep up with the swift pace set by Brahms as he had been when they had gone out for their first walks not long after Brahms had appeared at their door in Düsseldorf and by so doing had transformed his life.
In the boy and his music he had found both reason and passion (so often in lethal conflict) to live; it was, he supposes, a measure of his true madness that upon having made this discovery, he began to edge ever closer to the river, this same Rhine that flows outside the window of his madhouse, and finally to take the dive to death that only now, as he lies in wait for Clara, may see him take the waters.
On their sad way back along the Endenich road, when they had stopped talking either in anticipation of their imminent separation or because Beethoven tended to induce silence in other composers,* Robert suddenly said, “May I borrow your spectacles?”
“Where are yours?” asked Johannes.
“In my room.”
“Did you forget them?”
“My mind…,” he said equivocally and tapped himself just above his ear.
Johannes carried his glasses in his knapsack, which combined peculiarly with the blue Wertherian jacket he wore as emblem less of his esteem for Goethe than of the kind of hopeless love that had passed for love supreme back in 1774. He rarely used his spectacles. They spoiled the beauty of his face, which was made all the more beautiful because he did not realize they spoiled the beauty of his face. He did not wear them because when his long hair fell across his face and he brushed it away with his hand, sometimes he brushed his glasses off and always he managed to cloud them with the oils from his callow skin.
“Why didn’t you ask me for them earlier if you couldn’t see?”
“I could see all I wanted to.”
“The trees? The birds? The road before you?”
“I could see you. Beside me, even.”
“I have always walked too fast.”
“Does Clara still walk every day?”
“Every day we’re together.”
“In Düsseldorf ?”
“Lübeck, Hanover, Hamburg, Rotterdam…wherever we’re together. She doesn’t care to walk alone.”
“She never did.”
“Do my glasses help?”
“I can see her,” said Robert, staring through the glasses at Brahms.
Her letters from London (burned, as he has burned her earlier letters, though these one by one and not in such a piss-stenched bonfire as books are burned by tyrants), whence she is now returning upon having received from Dr. Richarz the news that he is dead or dying, Robert can’t remember which, Clara has described her meetings with Queen Victoria. They are the same age, it has surprised Robert to learn—queens, unlike princesses, are always old, and Clara becomes to him increasingly the girl she was, as he grows old not so much with time as with weakness and the impotence of an artist emptied of his art. She had been invited to England by the Philharmonic Society and told that a brief concert tour would reward her sufficiently to pay his Endenich expenses for an entire year. Johannes, she said, did not want her to go; he rounded up a group of friends and musicians who agreed to pledge an equal amount of money to keep her home and him asylumed. But she would take no such charity and went to England, alone, her parting from Johannes the most painful she had ever experienced, leaving her numb, her body, she said, “lifeless,” a word that’s haunted Robert, because it is how he feels himself except when he remembers her. She has written from all the cities where she’s played—Manchester, Liverpool, Dublin, London. In the last of these, Robert’s oratorio, Paradise and the Peri, had been performed to great acclaim. This was the story taken from a Thomas Moore poem that Wagner had tried and failed to make into an opera. The Lind was in London to sing in it; Pauline Viardot was in London to see it; she, Clara, astounded all of musical London by appearing in the chorus and joined her voice to Jenny’s and her heart and her tears to the music written by a husband so far away and so long unseen, untouched.
It had been nearly a decade since Jenny made her London debut, again as Alice. Queen Victoria had been there, as had Mendelssohn, who that time, at least, needed procure no tickets and thus was spared participation in, if not observation of, the riot at the box office. The English press went so far as to claim that no artist in history—not Farinelli, not Catalani, not Sontag, not Liszt, not even Paganini, not even Mendelssohn—had caused such a fever of delirium.
Queen Victoria, at the final curtain of that day in early May, left her box to place a wreath at Jenny’s feet. The queen had done this for no one, not even Mendelssohn.
Six months to the day after he had, with unselfish delight, watched the English replace him in their hearts with Jenny, Mendelssohn died. His first stroke came when, at lunch with Cécile, he began to shake uncontrollably and then passed out and then, in his wife’s arms, awakened, speaking to her in great haste and agitation in a language in which he had heretofore never addressed her: English. It was as if he were back in London with Jenny.
A few days later, when he seemed to be resting and thus to be recovering, he began to moan through day and night and finally to sing, to sing endlessly, perhaps the kind of music, said Robert, that I hear in my head and am unable to voice, so in that case Felix was fortunate, to the very end his music was heard by others.
Robert packed his best dark Stutzer und Hinter suit for what the Mendelssohn family called the funeral but was not—the burial would be elsewhere. Robert wanted to see Felix one last time but not at that moment when he became irretrievable.
“I will come with you,” said Clara.
“Then I would not be able to go.”
“Do you not need me?”
“So much that I could not bear for you and death to occupy the same city, or my mind.”
He left Clara in Dresden with the children and went to Leipzig. In order to gain entry into the Mendelssohn home in the Königstrasse, he had to push his way through a huge, grief-purging crowd and then explain to the servant at the door—someone new who must have been hired in order to deal with the horde of mourners and recognized neither Robert’s name nor face—that he wrote music too and was married to the pianist Clara Wieck Schumann. “I was told to look for the man who is to do the death mask,” said the servant. “He should be along soon,” said Robert—”he just finished working on mine.” The servant jumped quickly out of the way.
Robert waited until he could be alone to view the body. And then he had to shut the door behind him, a breach of etiquette and contravention of the custom that required corpses never be enclosed with
in four unbroken walls; if this had originated in an ancient Teutonic desire to allow the odor to dissipate or the soul an outlet into the rest of the house, perhaps the universe itself, he did not know. He felt he had no choice. The public was being allowed in a few at a time to the flower-choked room, lit only by torches that flickered with an apt approximation of life itself.
From downstairs, he could hear Felix’s children playing with their dolls. Their voices were cheerful, blithe. But death would, now, be forever in their throats.
Felix wore a smile of his own. He could not have died with it. Someone had taken the trouble to mold it there. It was not incongruous so much as unnecessary. There was no more need to advertise joy than despair. God help us all if the dead have moods.
What could not have been manipulated were the two prominent veins standing out on his friend’s forehead. Robert had envied these in life and accused himself for a moment of having come all this way merely to see that they had not survived death. Brilliance in life, he noted, was often accompanied by tumid veins in the head. Sometimes they were by the temple, sometimes closer to an eye, sometimes behind the ear, sometimes in a bald man visible amid the bumps and gullies of the landscape of the brain.
He had no such demonstrative veins. He had wished for them, the way a boy might wish to be tall or a man might wish for a larger prick. He had held his breath before mirrors, puffing out his cheeks, in search of these worms of genius lounging on the surface of his long-suffering head. Once, when he was exceptionally, unrealistically, angry with Clara because she had written in their diary that the sound of his piano drowned out the sound of hers, which he took to be a frightful metaphor for a more general frustration, he thought he felt veins swell out of the skin above his left eye and ran from the room to search out his image, only to discover that his anger had caused his forehead to become creased and that what looked back at him was a man who was unhappy with the sound of his own music, not his wife’s.
