Longing

by J. D. Landis

  The capital of Bavaria combined Leipzig’s veneration of music and Dresden’s of painting and sculpture. As Robert and Gisbert walked through the streets in search of Heine’s house, everyone they observed seemed either to be singing a song to himself or viewing a work of art behind his eyes. They all seemed quite mad, or at least distracted. Never had the two youths been so bumped into and jostled by seemingly intelligent people who were not yet—the boys’ coach had arrived early in the morning—drunk.

  Robert had expected Heine to be moody and misanthropic but found instead a veritable Anacreon, at thirty-one nearly the same age as that great poet was when he died and like him able to contain a reckless freedom in subject matter within a graceful and confining prosody that gave form to his raptures and made art of his passions.

  He had also expected Heine to be surrounded by followers and sycophants, for he had recently become immensely popular with the publication of two volumes of Travel-Sketches and his Book of Songs. But Heine was alone when he answered their knock on his door and, when Robert mentioned Dr. Kurrer’s name, shook hands warmly and immediately welcomed them in and engaged them in the kind of conversation Robert had always dreamed he might have with a great artist.

  When Robert told Heine that he and Gisbert were in law school, Heine smiled with a kind of ironic bitterness and said, “I was sent off to study Roman law myself. I studied Roman law in Bonn. In Göttingen. In Berlin, of all places. But all the while I studied law, what I learned was literature. I memorized the law; I absorbed Don Quixote. So what do you think of Dr. Kurrer’s daughter?”

  “Don’t ask,” said Gisbert.

  “She killed me and brought me back to life with a single glance,” said Robert.

  Heine’s smile turned positively wistful. “I had a cousin like her. She won my heart and destroyed it, if not with a single glance then a single word.”

  “What word?” asked Robert.

  “The worst word a woman can say to a man.”

  “What word?” insisted Robert.

  ‘“No.’”

  “Ah,” said Robert.

  “Ah, indeed,” Heine amplified.

  He asked Gisbert if he was Jewish, and when Gisbert said he was, Heine said, “They’ve recently excluded all Jews from academic positions in Prussia. With the departure of Napoleon, if you were a Jew and forwent a good dunk into the bloody river that flows from the fundament of Christian doctrine, you could scarcely find work at all. When I wrote for the newspaper in Augsburg they put a Jewish star next to my contributions. Presumably to signal both my corruption and the corruption that might envelop anyone who read my words. I hated it, but better that than a cross, no? The morbid little sect of Nazarenes that gave birth to Christianity also gave birth to the kind of asceticism that sets such limits upon its followers that it cuts off their balls and cuts out their hearts and then sends the poor, doubly emasculated souls out into the world with the injunction, ‘Go forth, and be miserable.’ I should know—I’m like you now,” he said to Robert.

  “I’m not like that!” Robert protested.

  “Baptized, I mean,” explained Heine with an expression that fused upon his lambent features a furious rage with an appalled contrition. “I was led to believe that the baptismal certificate was the price of admission to European culture. Some culture! It thrives on the detestation of the incompatible. When I was a Jew, only Christians hated me. What should have been a mark of distinction I was so immature as to take for a mark of Cain. Now everybody hates me. As well they should. I am an absurdity: Christian Johann Heinrich Heine, according to my baptism of June 28, 1825, at Heiligenstadt. But you, my friends, may call me Harry.”

  So Harry Heine fed them lunch in his garden and then took them that very afternoon for a walk through town and then for a tour of the Leuchtenburg Gallery, where he was approached, and they with him, by dozens of admirers, who seemed not to hate him at all but crowded around this small, trim, handsome man as if for no other purpose than to absorb some minute portion of his being into their own. This is what it meant to be an artist, Robert realized: to remain whole even as you fed yourself to others. What a glorious way to live. No one else—no emperor, no priest, no general, no physician, no courtesan, no streetsweeper, no seer—gave to mankind what the artist did. The artist, who created beauty out of the raw material of his self, was the only possible savior. Man without his politicians and police was at worst man disorganized; man without his artists was man erased.

  Robert’s joy at meeting Heine was tempered by his separation from Gisbert, who left Munich for Heidelberg while Robert made his slow way back to Leipzig behind a series of geldings whose very asses mocked his loneliness. There he found Emil waiting for him when he would much rather have found the man he had so recently left at the station in Munich, to whom he wrote, “I think of you most lovingly, though even while both asleep and awake I see sweet Clara’s image perpetually before my eyes.”

  But there were others Robert loved and with whom he was able to replace Emil, in his heart if not actually in his dwelling. Chief among them was Wilhelm Götte, with whom he had lately been learning to get high, as he called it, in taverns and, while high, carrying on with Wilhelm an endless conversation about what Jean Paul called Sehnsucht, a longing for what was not there, which Robert had concluded was the essence of music, not merely in its creation, whether on paper or improvised, but in one’s experience in listening to music, that great longing music brought forth in our beings for what had been lost and what had been forgotten and what had simply never been at all.

  Robert compared Wilhelm not to a Greek poet or a Roman god but to Napoleon in his twenty-fourth year, still noble, trim, distingué, superhuman. When not talking with Wilhelm, Robert wrote about him and how he felt for him the “nameless and infinite something that cannot be spoken, the overwhelming desire inspired in those of a lyrical nature like myself when the world of sounds breaks open or when the sky is rent by thunder or when the sun comes up from behind the mountains.”

  He also wrote for Wilhelm, and dedicated to him, an essay that he called a “Fantasie Scherzando” and entitled “On Geniality, Getting High, and Originality,” in which he called love “the true sensorium of chaste sobriety” and intoxication—whether from alcohol, tobacco, black coffee, or women whose shape alone beneath gauzy gowns causes arousal—a means to inspiration.

  He wrote poems as well to Wilhelm, finding words before music the accurate means for the expression of his feelings:

  And how madly one boy loves the other boy,

  And how he holds him, and how they weep together…

  It was Wilhelm Götte who delivered the news of Schubert’s death. He entered Robert and Emil’s rooms without knocking and found the latter reading and the former composing at his ducat-a-month rental piano, his nearly black cigar pointing upward to keep the smoke from his eyes, his eyes squinting nearsightedly downward at his hands, his face contorted with the effort to see and smoke at the same time and also because he liked to whistle while he wrote and it was probably more difficult to whistle while smoking than it was to write music in the first place.

  Robert was so happy to see Wilhelm and so eager to impress him that the moment he became aware of his presence he doubled the tempo of his playing and began to improvise, changing the key from F major to E-flat minor, so that his friend might see his fingers operate almost wholly upon the black keys.

  Robert signaled with his head and the cigar that Wilhelm should approach him. But Wilhelm merely stood in the doorway with a stricken expression upon his perpetually suffering and therefore always striking face.

  He had never seen Wilhelm like this. Robert sensed he had come as a messenger of doom. He did not want news of further death, but neither did he want Wilhelm to stop looking as he did. He was pale and hollow-eyed so that the only color in his face was upon his lips, which seemed to have been bitten into red. It was a mask of anguish, which, should he never take it off, would leave him singularly blessed
with the gift of eternal comeliness. Suffering was always the midwife to beauty.

  Robert ceased playing at the very instant Wilhelm began to speak. It was as if they had rehearsed and the singer was now beginning his unaccompanied lament.

  “I have terrible news. Schubert died of typhus last month in Vienna. Schubert is dead, and with him all that was brightest and most beautiful in our life.”*

  Robert’s hands went over his ears. Emil, discovering it was too late to drop his book in what might be taken as a spontaneous reaction, tossed it gently and safely, but with a simultaneous cursing of God, across the room. Wilhelm closed the door behind him, shutting up within this small room all of what was surely at this moment the most intense grief being experienced anywhere by anyone.

  “We must drink,” he said. “Where’s the liquor?”

  With his hands still over his ears, Robert said, “Dead?”

  Robert did not wait for an answer before he put his hands down upon the keys of the piano and began to play Schubert’s “Blessed World.”

  As Robert played, the room turned black with night. Emil sat uneasily next to Wilhelm on the couch in order that they might share the bottle of brandy. The darkness became so complete that they spilled as much as they drank. Wilhelm seemed not to mind, but Emil began to think more of the cost of cleaning the couch than of the pleasure of having such a perfect excuse to get drunk, so he rose finally and lighted the oil lamp.

  Robert’s face was so wet from weeping as to suggest a membrane of moiré. His tears had even soaked through his cigar, leaving its wrapper heavy and wrinkled like an old man’s skin and its burned-out coal an extinguished black blind shrunken eye.

  Both boys went to him. This was dejection as they had never before seen. They had no words for it or for him, as Robert had no words for them. He seemed incapable of speech, only of the music he continued to play and the whispering glissade of his tears.

  They tried to lift his hands from the piano, at first competing for possession of them both, until finally Wilhelm took one and Emil the other. But Robert fought them, without seeming to put forth any effort. They knew he was strong—each, in fact, venerated his broad shoulders and barrel chest—but neither knew he could resist them thus. His hands went on playing even as his friends grasped a wrist apiece and tried to separate him from the piece he was playing, which they recognized as “Der Erlkönig,” becoming more and more impassioned as the music gave forth the terrible story of the boy in his father’s arms who is at first tempted and then threatened by the king of the elves.

  Finally, as they continued to hold him, he finished the piece, whispering the final words—“the child in his arms was dead”—and his hands seemed to float away from the piano and to take them with him.

  He rose. He turned toward the door to his bedroom. His tears now fell directly from his eyes to the floor and left their trail as he walked between his two friends, each of whom put an arm around his waist.

  In his room, he fell backward upon his bed, and the boys lay down with him, one on either side. Each curled up against him and eventually fell asleep, while Robert wept the whole night long and still failed to drown either his sorrow or himself.

  *The street where Richard Wagner had been born some fifteen years earlier.

  *Winckelmann was succeeded in his naive innocence by Johann Lavater, the Swiss founder of physiognomics, who loved the preserved dead bodies (or at least their surviving representations) of ancient Greek boys and believed that the well-toned body is the outward manifestation of inner moral goodness. He also believed that we have all been magnetized by God and that to locate this magnetic force within ourselves is to put one’s hand upon our divine organ, as it were.

  *Wilhelm Götte did not acknowledge that he was here quoting Schubert’s friend Moritz von Schwind.

  Leipzig

  OCTOBER 4, 1829

  I have wept only three times in my entire life:

  when my first opera failed; when a turkey stuffed with

  truffles fell overboard; when I heard Paganini.

  Gioacchino Rossini

  Earlier that year, Niccolò Paganini, on his first tour of north Germany, had stopped in Leipzig on his way to Berlin. He was not booked to play Leipzig, but Friedrich Wieck, with Paganini’s permission, tried to free up the Gewandhaus for a one-night stand. In this he failed. But when Paganini left for Berlin, he was followed by Wieck, who arranged for him to come back to Leipzig in the autumn and play not one but four concerts. “And by the way,” said Wieck, upon taking leave of Paganini, “when you are in Leipzig in October I trust you will do me the honor of listening to my daughter.” Paganini hooked one of his talon-like fingers into the bridge of his dark spectacles and pulled them down his nose so he could look at Wieck without the asylum of obscurity. “Violin?” he asked. “Piano,” answered Wieck. “Well, then,” said Paganini, shoving his glasses back up his nose and grinning in a bright and fetching way that Wieck would never have imagined his devilish features could align themselves, “since she is not competition and therefore will not rob me of my livelihood, the honor of listening to her will be mine.”

  At the time Paganini arrived back in Leipzig, Clara had been composing music of her own and playing in public for almost two years, mostly in private homes like that of the Caruses, although she had also traveled to Dresden to appear at two court soirées hosted by Princess Louise and at a fund-raiser for the Dresden Institute for the Blind, and had performed her first concerto, Hummel’s G major, to a private audience. She had even appeared at the Leipzig Gewandhaus; not, however, in official debut but merely as primo in Kalkbrenner’s four-hand Moses Variations.

  She had never played for anyone like Paganini. He was, her father told her, perhaps the greatest virtuoso, if not musician, alive. More important than that, he was the most famous. And what fame did for a musician, aside from making him rich, was to give him the power to make other musicians famous. And therefore rich. There were dozens of great virtuosi playing all over Europe, hundreds of wunderkinder, her age and even younger. What separated one from the other was not so much a question of talent—for how many among even the cosmopolitan public could discern with any subtlety the nuances of technique and interpretation?—as of reputation. And reputation was made through the stated opinions of those already famous. Therefore, she must play for Paganini. Therefore, she must dazzle him.

  She was not at all nervous about this. The important relationship in music was between her and her piano, not her and her audience. It was the piano that received her body and through her body the transubstantiated body of the composer.

  Even hearing Paganini play did not shake her confidence in herself.

  She and her father went to the first of his Leipzig concerts. They sat in the audience with all the rest of their expectant neighbors, few of whom had heard Paganini play but all of whom knew his reputation. It was said of Paganini, and was being whispered now within Clara’s hearing, that he had been born of the Devil or was at the very least in league with the arch fiend. That he could raise the dead with his playing. That he had labored for, as both musical director and lover, Napoleon’s sister, the Princess of Lucca. That he had been in a Naples prison for twenty years for having murdered another of his mistresses, solitarily confined for that entire time with nothing but a chamber pot and a one-stringed broken violin, and of the two he used only the violin in all that time. That the strings of his favorite violin had been fashioned from the intestines of that same mistress, whom he had murdered not because she had been unfaithful but because she had yawned when he was playing, and upon pushing his knife into her guts he had said, “Sorry to bore you.”

  As had been written of him, “You would as soon expect melody from a corpse,” and that is what he looked like as he seemed to float into the hall simultaneously with the raising of the curtain, which revealed dozens of golden candelabras in which burned what seemed like thousands of black candles. Their flames twisted in terror as Paganini drifte
d past them to the center of the stage, which at least proved he was made of matter and was not what he appeared to be, a skeletal wraith, though neither was he the romantically arrogant, curly-haired artist represented by Jean Ingres in the portrait of which Clara’s father had given her a copy for her recent birthday, painted ten years ago, at the very time of her birth.

  He wore a coat and vest so tight she could not imagine he could scratch an itch, let alone raise both violin and bow, and pantaloons so loose she could not keep from envisaging his private parts swinging like a bell and its clapper. All his clothing was as black as the candles, blacker than the blue-black glass in his spectacles, which sat atop his huge hooked nose like the lashless, dispassionate eyes of an insect. His skin, however, was pale, more yellow than white, which is how Clara imagined the dead must look, sickly rather than pure, his cheeks hollow as if they had never been fed, and his black hair growing long down his back the way the hair of the dead was said to grow long after the rest of the body was left looking…well, exactly like Paganini.

  In one hand he held his violin and bow, in the other a pair of scissors. Clara thought, “I knew his hair was too long!” and wondered if he was actually going to cut it and perhaps throw the strands out into the audience for souvenirs, as a young pianist in Paris named Franz Liszt was said to throw his cigar butts to certain women in attendance at his concerts. But Paganini did not use the scissors to cut his hair. Holding his violin out before him like a magician attempting to display the incorruptibility of his props, Paganini severed three of its four strings, each of which gave one sharp and final cry of wretched music before trembling to death. The audience gasped, Clara recoiled out of sympathy for the pain being suffered even now by his poor mistress, and Paganini began to play, on that one G string, the “Witches’ Dance.” Oh, what a trick it seemed, even the impossible production of what sounded like but could not be polyphony on that single string, as the severed strings whipped around his neck and head like long filaments of glass dipped in candlelight. If he went this far, she wondered, why did he not simply cut all four strings and then play?