by J. D. Landis
“I was sitting by the river—,” began Robert.
“She drowned herself,” said one of the men.
“Yes. I thought so,” said the doctor. “I’m not surprised. But we mustn’t judge her harshly,” he added, to Robert’s parents. “Her torment had become unbearable. The infection had spread to her vulva. The itch she had experienced periodically over the rest of her body became intensified when it reached the delicate tissues of the genitalia. To see her try to alleviate it…” The doctor shook his head. “Her efforts were as tragic and unsightly as the disease. And there was nothing to be done. I tried everything, as you know. There was nothing to be done.”
“Try this!” screamed Robert as he threw the crumpled blossoms from the toadflax at the doctor and ran toward the stairs to escape from existence in the room where his sister had left her suffering to him.
Leipzig
JANUARY 22, 1826
An angel-child floats down from on high,
Sits at the keys, and the songs sweep by.
Robert Schumann
Friedrich Wieck celebrated the first anniversary of his divorce from Clara’s mother by having a new Stein piano delivered for his daughter.
He could not believe she was his. It was not the possession of her, to which he was entitled by law, but the possession of her, precisely her being possessed by what he could not have given her himself. She was a genius at playing the piano. And he, while he might be a genius at teaching the piano, was not at playing it. And genius was not something to be taught, only nurtured. Therefore, she did not come to her genius through him. Therefore, he could not believe she was his.
But she was his. She was his by law, and she was his by love. It was even his love for her that had allowed him to let her, his firstborn after the death of little Adelheid, go off to Plauen with her faithless mother and her lover, Bargiel, for the summer of ’twenty-four. She was female, and she could neither speak nor hear (words only; he was convinced she could hear music), and he let her mother keep her for the few months until her fifth birthday. Then he sent for her. He didn’t care whether she could talk to him or hear him talk to her. He wanted her for the music he knew was in her.
Her mother had no choice in the matter and did not try to keep her. By Saxon law, thank the good Lord, Clara was his property, to do with as he wished. And what he wished was to nurture her genius.
Marianne had begged him to allow her to deliver Clara personally. But he couldn’t bear the sight of her, his beautiful wife, who had betrayed him with his own good friend and colleague. And he couldn’t bear the idea that she might come back into this house where she had allowed herself to be courted by the man who had become her husband in place of him. So he had sent his maid to Altenburg, halfway between Leipzig and Plauen and thus a compromise in itself, to fetch Clara and bring her to him.
“Hello, Clara,” he said when Fräulein Strobel appeared with his daughter. Her eyes, which had always seemed unnaturally large, perhaps in compensation for the apparent uselessness of her mouth, now appeared positively monstrous, perfect black eggs set in the pearl of her face.
She looked at him blankly.
Fräulein Strobel shook her head sadly.
He didn’t care she could not speak. Or even that she could not hear—language, that is. In fact, he thought she might be all the better a pupil if she couldn’t talk back to him or ask questions of him and if he didn’t have to talk to her but merely demonstrate and play and thus guide her only by touch and the sound of the piano. Music and words were inimical.
He did not believe that instruction should begin before the pupil’s sixth birthday. Never mind that Mozart had become celebrated overnight when he played publicly in Vienna at that very age in 1762. So he planned to wait a year before sitting Clara down at the piano.
He lasted a month.
On October 27, 1824, five years, one month, two weeks after her birth, he conducted her first lesson.
He did not believe that pupils so young should have more than three lessons a week. But Clara was not young musically. So he gave her a lesson every day, without fail.
But before he even put her at the piano for the first time, he took her to the table in the kitchen and, because the chair was low and could not be adjusted like the piano stool, sat her on his lap and placed her hands on the tabletop. Because she neither spoke nor heard words, he said nothing. He put his hands on top of hers and was prepared to cup and flex hers up into the proper position, when he felt the pressure of the back of her hands on his palms and realized that her hands were moving into position by themselves.
With her dark, sweet hair in his face, and her thin legs wrapped around his as if she knew she was about to be appropriated by powers greater than herself, she made music on the table by moving each finger discretely up and down, learning how familial they were, born together but destined to play apart.
Thus he began to train her physically. There was the hand, which encompassed for some pianists the wrist and the arm, though Wieck preferred the Clementi style of someone like Moscheles, on whose arm it was said one might successfully balance a full glass of water while he played the most strenuous piece. And there was the ear.
For the former, she continued to practice upon the kitchen table, even when she became tall enough to sit there by herself, and at the piano to play scales, which she enjoyed more than he’d ever seen anyone enjoy them, so that he had to limit them, as was his custom, to fifteen minutes a day, in all keys, fast and slow, loud and soft, staccato and legato. He gave her various exercises so that she might master the eternal passing under of the thumb and in the end, as he called it, “dethumb” her hand and turn the demon of the thumb into an angel (albeit never as graceful as the others in its shape) of a finger. (As it was, she very early on could easily take tenths in both hands; a tiny, skinny girl with big hands was like a little man with a huge zubrick, disproportionately admired, inequitably skilled.) He also had her play the scales with separate hands, so that the hands, like the fingers on each, would be forced to become independent of one another and thus not attempt to hide, like twins, one another’s faults. “Hands alone,” he called this, and while later it would prove a fine technique for her early forays into J. S. Bach’s fugues, it was a phrase that always brought to her a feeling of loneliness, even estrangement—her hands from one another; her hands, together, from the rest of her being—and was also the first musical words that registered as words within her mind.
Within the practice of scales came the flowering of technique. Fingers were to be held close to the keys. The keys were to be squeezed, never struck; the sound of the finger on the key should be no sound at all, neither of the exertion of muscle nor the application of skin nor the click of fingernail; the only sound to be heard should be musical sound.
In other words, you draw music from the piano, you do not make music upon it. The music is in there; it is your job to find it.
But technique went only so far. To try both to teach and amuse her, in case she might finally respond to speech, he made up a jingle:
The first rule of the artist to defend
Is “Technique’s no more than a means to an end.”
When mere technique controls the day,
Art will always waste away.
He thought it brilliant himself, but to judge from Clara’s vacant expression at hearing it (if she could hear it at all), it was redundant. She seemed to know without having to be taught that she was training her hands to be able not simply to move them flawlessly upon the piano keys but to thrust them into the piano itself, without making a sound, and to hold the beating heart of that instrument within the opulence of her fingers.
As for the training of her ear, it was begun with her closing her eyes and her concentrating on the ears as organs of the body that could be exercised as much as could her fingers or her legs and lungs during the long, silent exercise-walks on which he took her to the wooded park at Zweinaundorf, east out of Leipzig. “The e
ar can be opened from within,” he would tell her, unsure whether she could hear him but knowing from the increasing looks of pleasure on her face when she listened to him play that she understood and that she was teaching herself how to capture music through the strengthening of her ear.
In the beginning, he would permit her to play only by ear. This allowed him to gauge her grasp of sound, which was all music was before it was written down, and her to listen to music rather than read it and to close her eyes if she wished and pretend her body was the piano and no one was permitted to draw pleasure from it but herself.
Once she learned to distinguish all the keys, major and minor, by ear, and to locate and practice triads and dominant sevenths with inversions in all keys as well, and to find the subdominant and dominant chords in each key and to modulate when she wanted or when he demanded from major and minor keys through the diminished seventh, by using the leading note of the dominant, she still was not given music to read but instead was encouraged to improvise and to compose her own pieces, which he taught her to write down and in so doing taught her to read music. He considered it very important to excite a student’s mind and let it develop, not degrade it into a mere machine. She learned more than sixty short pieces by ear, which she could play in any key, in any style, and with the myriad cadences appropriate to the pieces themselves.
When she was ready to play from music set before her, he started her on Karl Czerny’s Toccata, which most of his students couldn’t play until much further into their studies. And for the improvement of her improvisation, which was expected of all pianists who performed in public, she studied Czerny’s Guide to the Art of Improvisation.
And she sang.
He believed not so much that the human voice was the first great musical instrument, as the cliché had it, as that the piano was the first great voice created by humans, toward which all musical instruments had been striving since man first blew through a reed and banged together the bones of an enemy and the Greeks plucked kitharas and the Jews tongued trumps.
And nothing facilitated unaffected keyboard cantabile better than the singing voice itself. For him, the basis of all pianistic phrasing was song, with its natural rise and fall of tone, its breath points, its expressive accentuation. In each phrase, there was a center of gravity, to be located by the finger in the gut of the piano like a singer in her own belly.
Thus, the first sounds Friedrich Wieck heard his daughter make, from her body and not solely from the piano that she seemed to grip in her fingers like a hawk its prey, was in her imitating him in the simple E-flat major andantino duet that Pamina and Papageno sing about the blessing of love toward the end of the first act of The Magic Flute:
In love abides life’s greatest bliss.
Love guards the heart from life’s abyss.
“You sing beautifully,” he said.
“Thank you, Papa,” she sang, and laughed, because she had meant to speak, and the words had come out as music.
He laughed as well. “You’ve been listening all along?”
“Not listening,” she managed to say with a bit less lilt in her voice. “Hearing.”
“Why have you not spoken before this, my child?”
“I was listening,” she answered.
“Sing,” he said, because he thought she was confused.
Clara’s new piano had been made by Andreas Stein in Vienna. Friedrich Wieck enjoyed a profitable relationship with Stein and had no hesitation in selling his pianos, but between the two dominant schools of piano execution, the Viennese and the English, he preferred the latter.
The “bravura” school of Vienna, championed by Czerny, demanded that its piano have light action, so that, in the words of Hummel, “it may be played upon with ease by the weakest hand”; which is not to say that Clara, as young as she was, was weak of hand. The Viennese damping was perhaps more efficient than the English, for while the hammers of both were covered with leather, the Viennese were mounted on the key and not on the frame and were sometimes hollow and were always lighter, which allowed the pianist greater velocity, delicacy and roundness of tone, lambency, elegance, and, as Hummel also said, “every conceivable degree of light and shade.” It was no wonder that Mozart favored the Stein, which allowed his playing to “flow like oil,” as he boasted, though Friedrich was forced, alas, to take such description on faith, since he had been only six years old when Mozart died in 1791, thirty-four years ago and seeming an eternity.
Why did it seem an eternity? Beethoven! Beethoven played the piano from the “singing” school of England, founded by Clementi upon the instruments fashioned by the Erard brothers in Paris and especially John Broadwood in England itself. The English piano was heavier and deeper in touch, slower, more difficult to play. But what rewards there were for the effort! Beethoven had transformed the piano from a toy to a veritable bomb from which exploded the expression of his torment. Its sonority was staggering, the brilliance of its sound almost unendurably profound. It was no longer merely a musical instrument. It was an expression of being.
Wieck had heard Beethoven play. Not in some salon or draughty hall but in Beethoven’s own rooms on the fourth floor of Pasqualati House (named for the court physician of Maria Theresa, whose son was so thrilled to become Beethoven’s landlord that he unwisely did not demand from him a security deposit) on the Mölker Bastei in Vienna. It was one of more than thirty flats in which Beethoven would live during his thirty-five years in that city. Wieck, who prided himself on the orderliness of his own home, if for no other reason than to demonstrate to his students that art and anarchy were not synonymous, found Beethoven’s distressingly squalid and, given his admiration for the art of its tenant, disillusioning. Clouds of moisture threatened the cracked ceiling. Ink-scabbed pens lay strewn upon a walnut secretaire. Worst of all, the piano was defamed by scrolls of dust upon the top and a brimming chamber pot beneath. Friedrich had gained entrance through the pretense of being a specialist in diseases of the ear and a manufacturer of hearing-aid devices. But Beethoven proved so deaf that Friedrich was not sure the composer even heard what he was there for. He simply pointed Wieck toward the only caned chair untenanted by tossed-off clothes or half-finished plates of food, ordered him to sit, and, explaining that he needed to drink to subdue the torment of his colic and the anarchy of his diarrhea, poured them both glass after glass of red wine, which was too good to have been Austrian and filled in the pockmarks on Beethoven’s face with tiny pools of florid incandescence. Seemingly under the influence of the wine, Beethoven talked incessantly of how his housekeeper was torturing him, and his brothers cheating him, and the Viennese public demeaning him, and Ignaz Schuppanzigh disgusting him by swallowing his violin within the folds of his many chins, and the Leipzig Gewandhaus ignoring him, and democracy disappointing him, and Italian opera diminishing him, while German opera was boring him (he even made up on the spot a ribald poem that ended, “Catalani, Lablache, and the splendid Rubini / Are the only ones worthy of holding my wienie”), all the while rolling his eyes and pulling at his hair and calling Wieck “my good man, whoever you are” when he was not calling him “my savior.” Finally, Beethoven pushed himself out of his chair, spilling red wine all over his trousers, and sat down at his Broadwood, and with his eyes gazing heavenward improvised crystalline and charming melodies that to Wieck were all the more precious because he knew he was the only one in the room who could hear them.
He had come away from Beethoven both drunk and determined that the piano must be put back on the path Beethoven had forged and on which the world was afraid to tread. Through the piano, and the piano alone, came the voice of God to man, and the voice of man to God. And the music..the music had been changed forever by Beethoven. Yet no one but he had been able—no, others had been able, simply not willing—to hear it.
Clara, his precious daughter, his little genius, whom he possessed but who was possessed by more than he would ever possess himself, heard it. Her obliviousness to speech seemed to
mask a passion for musical sound, as out of her own reticence grew an exquisite musical expressiveness. He did not expect her to be Beethoven. He did not want her to be Beethoven. One musician should influence another only up to the nearest boundary of the latter’s singularity.
So let Beethoven have his Broadwood. Clara would have her Stein, because he had promised it to her once she learned all of Spohr’s songs and Mozart’s E-flat Major Concerto and because it suited her and because he knew that in the presence of such ability as hers he must be flexible. There is a natural conservatism among teachers of music, because music’s rules require obedience. But music itself is a radical art and demands of its followers an insurrectionary bias. Therefore, he must be both tyrant and patron. It was not so much that his dreams for himself were wrapped up in his daughter—for he was a great success as a teacher if not entirely as a man—as his dreams for her were wrapped up in himself. He could only imagine what it must be like to be so gifted. He wanted her to experience her gift in its full flowering. He would be, thus, her gardener, no more, no less.
They sat together at the new piano.
“What would you like to play first?” he asked.
Without answering, she ran four octaves up and down of the B-flat minor scale, eschewing legato for the leap of her left ring finger off the G-flat.
He recited another of his verses:
The artist’s first rule
Is “Technique is a tool.”
But your art suffers shame
If technique is your aim.
“You’re not a very good poet, Papa.”
“Oh, really?”
“But you’re a wonderful teacher.”
“Oh, really.”
“I love my new piano.”
“And well you should. It cost a fortune.”
“I’ll pay you back someday.”
“Not someday. Now.”
She turned to him where he sat next to her at her new piano and put her hands on his knees and bunched up the cloth from his trousers within them.