Longing

by J. D. Landis

  He could feel Mendelssohn’s veins upon his palm. Should anyone succeed in coming into the room, he would look like a madman feeling for fever in a body so cold it was soothing. He didn’t know whether he wished to impart some of his life to Felix or to take Felix’s life into himself. The gulf between them was not enlarged by death, merely extended. No one had helped him more than Mendelssohn—hiring him to teach at the Leipzig Conservatory, providing his wife with stage and audience and therefore income, showing him the example of a composer whose every written note (and improvised too!) was praised and loved and therefore he did not become the composer he might have and worked himself into the grave at the age of thirty-eight because he lived with the curse of satisfying everyone but himself. Yet Robert knew that Mendelssohn did not love the music Robert wrote. He praised it, sometimes, but he didn’t love it. Nor should he have. “Don’t you want to be popular?” Felix had asked, the implication being “popular like me.”

  “Perhaps,” he confessed, by which his friend was pleased, until Robert added, “I just don’t want to have to write popular work.”

  Felix had asked him, “Are you faithful to your wife?” “Without effort,” he replied. “I cannot say the same,” confessed Felix. “Do you refer to the infidelity or the effort?” asked Robert. “The effort, of course.” “The Lind?” “The Lind.”

  It was as if Jenny had died with Felix. He left nothing more of an opera he was writing for her than a tantalizing fragment; in it she was to have been Lorelei, the nymph of the Rhine who lured men to their doom with her song, as she, Jenny, had lured him to what she knew, if it was doom, was doom rhapsodic. She had long been scheduled to have appeared in his Elijah in Vienna. But when it was sung, on schedule, ten days after his death, she had withdrawn from what turned out to be yet another memorial to her greatest love. The singers were dressed in black; the music stands draped in black. On the conductor’s stand lay the score and the same kind of laurel wreath that in great profusion surrounded Felix as he lay here in this torch-lit room on the Königstrasse with Robert’s hand upon his forehead. Perhaps his ghost conducted that Elijah; no one else stood at the conductor’s stand. It was as empty as Jenny’s place, and her heart.

  And Robert’s. He was one of six pallbearers who carried the coffin from the Mendelssohn home to St. Paul’s Cathedral. Moscheles was among the others, just behind Robert on the right side of the casket. As they were preparing to lift it for the first time, Robert told Moscheles about a program he had kept from a concert he had attended in Karlsbad when he was a little boy, with his father.

  Finally, he wept, for his friend, and his father, and himself. He wept as he marched with more than a thousand people surrounding him on the way to the cathedral (hung with black sheets, which applauded hollowly in the brisk November wind), behind a band of clarinets and oboes and bassoons playing a Beethoven funeral march and a second little orchestra that performed Mendelssohn’s own march from the fifth book of Songs without Words, into the cathedral, where music students from the Conservatory sat separated from Leipzig and Saxon government officials but all were soon embraced equally by the boundless sound of a choir of six hundred singing a chorus from the dead man’s St. Paul and the final chorus from Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, this last piece of music causing Robert to picture Felix at the age of twenty, half a life ago, a brilliant boy releasing Bach into the air.

  A thousand more people, now carrying torches to light the night and Mendelssohn’s way to Heaven, accompanied the coffin to the railroad station. There, a reserved train left at ten o’clock on its way to Berlin and the Mendelssohn family vault in the Alter Dreifaltigkeitsfriedhof, stopping along the way in Koethen, Dessau, and Halle, in each of which, in the middle of the night, crowds had gathered at the railroad station and sang to the dead man songs he had written.

  Robert, who had taken the last train home to Dresden, read aloud to Clara, the next night in bed, the Berlin Staatszeitung account of the services and journey and funeral. Robert’s name, she was appalled to notice, had not been included among those of the pallbearers. “I don’t care at all, so long as I might find my name on your lips,” he said, discarding at last his fatigue from the trip and the strange hold upon his emotions that death—that emptiness, that absence, that reductio ad nihilo—had always maintained.

  It was an absence and emptiness fought over by Cécile Mendelssohn and Jenny Lind. “Life lasts so long,” said Cécile—“how can I live it alone?” “He was the only person who provided consummation to my being,” said Jenny—“and almost as soon as I found him, I lost him.”

  They competed in their mourning. Jenny did not sing a single note of Mendelssohn for two years. Then, on the anniversary of his death, she finally made up for her withdrawal at Vienna by singing in Elijah at Exeter Hall in London, a performance to raise money for the Mendelssohn Foundation established not by his family but by herself. On that evening, she put aside her trills, she subsumed her fioriture and her grupetti within her grief, indeed she purged her voice of all its operatic furbelow and produced a tone so pure and unornamented that there seemed no barrier between sound and music. Mendelssohn, it seemed, had finally entered her.

  Cécile could do little after this but die, which she did at the age of thirty-six, the very same week, Robert told Johannes, that you knocked on our door in Düsseldorf, considerably lightening the burden put upon our minds by thoughts of the Mendelssohn children, in age near our own, suddenly orphaned.

  It had been Marie, then twelve, their firstborn, who opened that door on Belkerstrasse in Düsseldorf, where they had moved from Dresden three years earlier to the very month, so Robert might obtain a salary as the city’s musical director and whatever prestige would attach to that position. Ferdinand Hiller had been leaving the post and offered it to Robert, who had hesitated only because when he looked up Düsseldorf in a geography text he discovered there was a large insane asylum in the middle of the city.

  “Who is it?” called Robert from the dining room, where he sat alone at the smaller of the two tables in the aftermath of the family lunch.

  There was no answer. He became concerned. It was not that he believed death actually knocked at one’s door. It didn’t need to. Therefore, silence was as much a threat as the inner concerts he had begun to hear, the great drumbeating that kept him awake at night and that Clara, awake beside him, stroking him, pretended were being caused by the unending street noises—screeching wagons, yowling children, sardonic barrel organs—when both knew he was hearing things that were as private as insanity.

  He dropped his cigar in the ashtray and went to rescue his daughter from the silence.

  But it was not death that stood before her and had rendered her mute. It was the most exquisitely charming boy he, and presumably she, had ever seen.

  He was short, not much taller than Marie, who looked like her mother, with her mother’s large hands and dark hair in the midst of which a pale, eye-inflamed face had been etched. But he was so slender as to appear somehow stretched to a maximum height, a perfection of balance. His hair was golden but not fine, thick with some sort of radiant promise, not particularly clean but all the more exciting for that. His clothes, as well, challenged the bourgeois edifice that Robert felt swelled out of his own backside into the mortgaged circuit of rooms and furniture and closets and curtains and artwork and glassware that floated behind him in cruel mockery of his own lost youth and the fervor of irresponsibility. The boy wore a collarless white shirt, so that his neck had long since dirtied even the dark blue alpaca of his short coat, which was raised from his shoulders by the straps of what must be—Robert could not see it from the front—a knapsack. His gray pants were short enough to perch almost perfectly on the very tops of his boots, whose leather appeared so worn yet burnished that even his feet were enviable, so free were they to march across the surface of the earth. In his hand he held a green felt hat, taken off, no doubt, in courtesy to Marie but that Robert wished back upon his head, to see what the
green might do to the blue of his eyes.

  “I am Johannes Brahms. Arrived from Hamburg.” His voice was soft, and high—soft, perhaps, because it was high.

  “Do you have a package?” Robert raised a hand and pointed with a curved finger over the boy’s head toward where his knapsack, if that’s what it was, might hold whatever it was he was here to deliver.

  “No more packages.“ His answer was enigmatic but his smile wholly unqualified, his teeth white with inexperience aside from one yellowed at the bottom center that marked him for the solace of tobacco. “But I do have a letter.”

  “From whom to whom?”

  “Joseph Joachim to you.”

  “Oh, you are Brahms!”

  Robert now recalled that he and Clara had had an earlier letter from their young violinist friend asking them to receive one Johannes Brahms, “successor to Beethoven.” Aside from the fact that the only possible successor to Beethoven could be, and was, in music’s serpentine chronology, Bach, Robert had been concerned at how casually Joachim threw around Beethoven’s name. He had that very day, and for about ten days previous, been working on a violin concerto requested, if not commissioned, by Joachim for himself. In that request, Joachim had begged Robert to be inspired by Beethoven’s example, as he drew a work out of his “deep quarry,” which Robert suspected was a great deal deeper—not in profundity but in obscurity and disquiet—than Joachim could ever imagine.

  As if he were a dancer and not a musician, Brahms crossed his arms over his head and reached behind with precious flexibility and relieved his body of what indeed proved to be a knapsack. With one hand, he held it by its straps, and with the other, he opened it. Robert gazed within. What secrets, he wondered, might a boy travel with, so lightly as to touch the earth with nothing more than what he carried on his back? A pair of socks? A book? A pen? A pad? An apple? A space of dreams? A future unconfined? He could see nothing but darkness until Brahms’s hand emerged.

  “Here is Pepi’s letter.”

  “Pepi?”

  “Joseph.”

  “I’ve had my own letter from…you call him ‘Pepi’?”

  Brahms pushed the letter toward Robert, who opened it only to see whether Joachim might this time have signed off with a “Pepi” for him too.

  He had not.

  Robert handed the letter back to Brahms.

  “Are you not going to read it?”

  “Are you not here to play the piano?”

  He would rather look at him than listen to him. From the time he had begun years ago to teach at the Leipzig Conservatory, there had been too many auditions by too many young musicians. How fitting that he should have ended up like his father, whom Robert once came upon reading through a pile of manuscripts with tears in his eyes. “Why are you crying?” Robert asked him. “Because,” he answered, “there is so little art and so goddamned many artists.”

  Brahms handed his green hat to Marie, the perfect gesture toward a girl who could not take her eyes from him until she might touch at least a piece of him. She led him to the closest room with a piano—a small parlor with a large Graf. Robert walked behind them, weary and afraid. He did not want to have to lie to this boy. He did not want to have to tell him the truth. Why were they sent to him, who had once lived in a house with a little student named Clara Wieck, younger than any of them, so gifted as to obliterate the future of pianists, like this one, who had not yet been born when she played for Robert and he went out and tried to make his hand as strong as hers?

  Brahms sat at the piano. Robert sank into his chair and motioned for Marie to stand next to him. She would kick him if he started to fall asleep. Or perhaps cover his face with Brahms’s hat.

  “Sonata in C Major,” Brahms announced softly.

  “C Major?” Robert felt he could hear it already. “Yours?” he forced himself to be polite.

  How many notes had the boy played before Robert stopped him? He has never been able to remember that. He sometimes thinks he stopped him before he’d played a single note. Yet he can hear those notes in his head, along with those others now that seem to come from Hell.

  He leapt to his feet and went to Brahms and went to put a hand upon his head. But he could not touch him. So his hand hovered over the boy’s fair hair like a halo, protection and glorification both.

  The boy went on playing. He seemed accustomed to the attention, or oblivious to it.

  “Stop.”

  But he didn’t. It was not that he was playing like a maniac, or a Liszt for that matter, letting the notes whip his body, his body assume the music’s corporeal form. Nor were his eyes closed. It was concentration in fulfillment of itself, as well as some vast pleasure in the music that he was unwilling to relinquish, for such was youth, drinking until drunk, indulging in the pleasures of the afterlife long ahead of time.

  “Please wait a moment.” Oh, to touch his head. “Clara must hear this.”

  Not “my wife”—“Clara,” he realized he had said. That it was this name that made the boy stop, or seemed to. Such an intimacy—to say one’s wife’s name to one who’s never met her. She was, of course, famous, though not as famous as she’d been as a child; marriage, and its ever-present consequence, motherhood, had seen to that. Nonetheless: In Europe, the name “Clara,” by itself, could mean only Clara Wieck Schumann, as she insisted she be called upon her programs, since the fame of Clara Wieck had not arrived undiminished upon Clara Schumann.

  Brahms smiled, not up at him but over at Marie, who, if she had been confused at her father’s strange behavior, was enlightened, literally, by the young man’s cheerful discomposure. She beamed and floated halfway off her chair.

  Robert rushed from the room to the foot of the stairs. “Clara, Clara, come here at once!”

  So she was there at once, running down the stairs, concern for him shadowing her face. How he had darkened her, in these thirteen years of marriage almost to the day; now, when he called her to share his joy, she assumed it was pain to which she traveled.

  “Is something the matter?”

  It was so incongruous—the meeting of her anxiety with his ecstasy—that he laughed. He was brimming over with amusement and relief. It had been so long since he could announce such pleasure. “My love, you must hear this. You’ve never heard music like this in your life.”

  He led her to him. Marie had risen wholly and was standing next to Brahms, looking down at him who looked only at his hands. She was so like her mother, years ago, waiting for the chance to touch his face.

  “Please be so kind as to begin your sonata from the beginning, young man.”

  Brahms played, it seemed, for hours, one piece after another, beginning like Beethoven with the first chord of his first sonata and in his second, in the same F-sharp minor of Robert’s first, beginning like Robert himself, with an even grander, more aggressive chord, and continuing like Robert until, in its finale’s ferment of scales and trills, he broke free from such homage and, as had been the case in the first sonata’s folkish andante, became himself, one, as Clara was to say, who comes as if sent from God.

  “Why have you said nothing?” Brahms asked when he had played all that he could, or would, play.

  “What is there to say?” asked Robert in return. What, indeed? “You and I understand one another. Won’t you join us for lunch?”

  “I don’t understand,” said the boy.

  “So long as we understand each other,” said Robert.

  “I still don’t understand.” There was a petulance to this sweet-faced, broad-shouldered young man, which gave a twist to the winsomeness of his lips and cinched them into a brief snarl of caustic testiness. What a pleasure to find, at an audition, arrogance not the auditor’s.

  “As Shakespeare said,” said Robert, who had lately returned to a reading of Shakespeare he had begun with Clara soon after their wedding for the purpose of copying every word that English master had written about music, ‘I understand thy kisses, and thou mine.’”

&nb
sp; “I don’t understand about lunch. Have you not eaten lunch?”

  Marie laughed and nodded vigorously, to confirm the young man’s genius and at the same time excuse her father’s eccentricity.

  “I meant tomorrow.”

  Robert touched Brahms finally, putting a hand on his shoulder to guide him to the front door, where they parted without another word, though Robert watched Brahms as he walked away, raising his arms to Heaven, as indeed he should, even if it was only so he might allow his knapsack to descend from his hands down his arms and over his shoulders until finally, just as he turned the corner and disappeared, it settled enviably into the fanned channel of his spine and carried him away.

  They could barely wait for his return. They spoke of nothing and no one else. He knew she had understood perfectly why he had sent the boy away. They could not share their pleasure in him were he to remain. The world was always tested first within the shelter of their marriage.

  But then he did not come. The table was set, the food cooked, the children bathed and lectured about manners and hospitality with the usual reference to Greek gods coming to Philemon and Baucis in disguise (in this case not much of a disguise), Marie gently teased but put in charge of the others, made into a little mother so that when the boy arrived she might assume the role of woman and flutter slightly less in her display of instant love.

  Robert was surprised to find Clara as anxious as he when the time for luncheon passed and still Brahms did not appear. He was accustomed to her soothing him when he could not sleep or a migraine ate his brain or hemorrhoids his anus or when drums beat inside his head and trumpets blew (in what else but C major) behind his eyes and every noise within the world became a musical tone and visions appeared because of what Dr. Helbig identified as labyrinthitis—finally, Robert thought, the perfect diagnosis for a man lost within the confines of his own existence, like a tone within an endless fugue, and saved each day, and night, by the cord played out by his tender Ariadne, who sometimes knelt sadly before him and sucked his fears away.