by J. D. Landis
Just as she had her own room on the top floor of the house and had been allowed to decorate it with the soft and comfortable furniture and billowing drapery that both she and her destructive kittens found so inviting, so Robert had his own room on the ground floor overlooking Reichstrasse, and his own piano, and it was at this piano he was sure to be sitting whenever Clara came home from her classes. It was his way of enticing her to him. He had discovered it quite by accident one day soon after his arrival when, instead of practicing his exercises, he had been improvising, wildly as usual, laughing and crying, getting up and sitting down, cigar in mouth, eyes closed against the smoke and the music, ears themselves half-closed to the dissonant harmonics and contentious rhythms and aggressive changes of key he seemed destined to produce whenever he was playing freely, as if his music were literally his signature, which itself was notoriously unreliable, and represented the perceptible manifestation of his otherwise inscrutable being. Improvisation was, for him, the writing of his autobiography upon the parchment of the air. But it was not merely the story of what he had become; it was also the story of what he was becoming. To make music was to give birth to oneself. You were, at the same time, naked, in terrible pain, dissevered, ecstatic.
What a state in which a little girl should find him.
But there she had been, sitting in the bay window or next to him on the piano bench, so still as not to be breathing, so quiet as not to be alive. He might never have seen her—or not seen her until he had finished his playing, at which he sometimes continued for hours, long after his cigar had burned down to a wet stub and self-extinguished—had not some ashes fallen from it and begun to smolder in his lap, the woodsy smell of which caused him to stop playing and start slapping himself around the buttons of his trousers.
It was not her laughter that startled him so much as the mere fact of her presence. The music he’d been playing drenched the room, pushing at the walls, beclouding the windows, securing the door. There was no room in here for anyone else. She had invaded his being.
“Your pants are on fire,” she said.
He tried to jump up, but his legs were so stiff from his having been seated for so long that he rose slowly and had to lean one hand against the piano for support while he slapped his backside with the other.
“Not there!” she said, and laughed even more.
He had not been trying to make her laugh. But aware now of the effect of his action, and captivated by this spontaneous expression of delight in a little girl whom he had known hitherto primarily through the often intimidating sound of her piano playing, he began to spank at himself with both hands.
She was reduced to incomprehensibility. She tried to speak but could not through her honks and giggles. He worried for a moment that she would be thrown into terror at this replication of her years of speechlessness, about which her father had told him rather proudly, as if it had been an augury of musical genius. But the levity in her huge eyes, which caused them to glow with tears and in their beaming elongation to drown his own in light, convinced him she was uncomplicatedly pleased with him.
She laughed long after he had stopped banging at his bottom. He had not known she was capable of being so amused, or himself of being so amusing. It made him cherish her for the very fun of this. The world was a gloomy place, after all, and there was little humor in it or in the way his favorite writers represented it, which is what he had always loved about them: their fatalism, their enveloping pessimism, the shrouds and veils and masks and shades with which they lent impermanent disguise to the tragedy of love and the implacable envelopment of all our dreams in death. Even when he went out to the taverns and drank himself into the shared hilarity that seemed to reach its utmost pitch in the moments before self-consciousness and the poison of the alcohol suddenly ground him coarsely down like a pestle into terror, he had experienced no such gaiety or airiness as this, which could hold no terrifying consequence, which was innocent and wholly blithe.
She had given back the bright, cheerful days of childhood to a man who had for years been preyed upon by the most horrible thoughts and who had a genius for uncovering the dark and terrible side of things and who had seemed capable of throwing away his life like a farthing.
He sat himself down and sought the refuge of communication not in speech but music. She sat there next to him for as long as he played, quiet, tiny, and, for the moment, altogether his.
Leipzig
NOVEMBER 8, 1830
At night when you were very small
I came bedecked as specter tall
And rattled at your door.
Robert Schumann
Clara had been scheduled to make her official debut at the Leipzig Gewandhaus on September 30, but what was somewhat grandiosely called the Revolution of 1830 intervened and effected the postponement of this much-anticipated event.
The revolution was said to have started two months earlier in France, where Clara, though barely two weeks beyond her eleventh birthday, was most eager to travel and perform, the name Paris having become synonymous, as it had and would in the minds of many who had never actually visited either place, with Paradise. But like most political events that convince people to take up arms and attempt to slaughter those of whose ideas, actions, language, iconography, appanages, child-rearing, or baba-baking they disapprove, this revolution did not begin where or when it began but elsewhere and earlier. Which is to say, it began generally at the birth of man, whether at Eden or at what Germans liked to think was Heidelberg, and specifically at the Karlsburg Congress of 1819, the very year of Clara’s birth. It was there that Metternich, so upset over student demonstrations in honor of Martin Luther (who had been hereticized by the Edict of Worms a mere 309 years before and been dead for only 273), compelled the universities to teach nothing of which he did not approve and ordered the press—for if Metternich believed anything, it was that what the public didn’t know couldn’t hurt him—to print nothing of which he did not approve. (And that of which he approved was “the monarchical principle.”) Or better yet, print nothing at all. It was around this time that Metternich’s secretary, Friedrich Gentz, defended his boss’s proposition, as follows: “In order that the press not be abused, nothing whatever shall be printed. Period.” Nothing. Shall. Be. Printed. Besides, who needed to read when they could be watching their eyes glaze over?
So it was too in France, where, during the White Terror after Waterloo, the French press was (how tedious becomes the catalog of repression) smothered, divorce outlawed (discontent is best left at home), and those with the most money were as if by divine fiat the most “conservative” and thus the most eager for a return to the fine old days of the Ancien Régime. But, like all ancien régimes, this one had to be paid for by those who had no stake in its recrudescence. In order to indemnify his aristocratic friends for their losses during the most recent revolution, King Charles X merely lowered the interest rate on national bonds, thus squeezing the lucre out of his subjects so he could spread it upon the pain of his people. When this was objected to, Charles stifled the press.
There were riots in Paris, and for good measure they expanded beyond the politics of power into the very politics of art and therefore life, out of the broken bones and taunts of philistinism of which emerged the nascent but wholly triumphant romanticism of Victor Hugo’s Hernani. As for musicians, they were freed by the revolution from having to enter through the back door and leave through the back door. Now they might even find themselves invited to tea with the understanding that they be permitted to “leave their fingers at home.”
July’s trois glorieuses plucked Charles from his throne and placed upon it the cunning Louis Philippe, who chose to align himself with the contra-Metternich Lafayette and thus to fool all the folks who thought he might actually belittle and belie his own beloved Bourbonism.
Like the cholera that was spreading at the same time through Europe, the revolution seeped from country to country in its attempt to bring democracy to those who didn’t kno
w they wanted it until they heard it was coveted by the French.
In Germany, the unrest began in Dresden and moved soon to Leipzig, where the police created a Communal Guard to protect the city from the egalitarian impulses of its citizens, to say nothing of the rioting of locksmiths whose jobs were being given to out-of-towners and the vandalism of rowdies over perceived rudeness in the passport office.
Clara found her father concerned very much with the possibility that, because of the small-scale but persistent rioting in Leipzig, her Gewandhaus debut might have to be put off, but he seemed otherwise uninvolved.
Robert, however, would play and sing for her the song of the Strasbourg revolutionaries—“Mort aux tyrans! Vengéance et liberté!”—improvising madly between choruses. He also set to music the antimonarchist version of the Lord’s Prayer—“Our ex-king, who art a knave, cursèd be thy name; thy kingdom never come; thy will be done neither in France nor anyplace else”—and then persuaded her to sing it along with him, which produced in her a tiny thrill of transgression that she attempted to deepen as she sat beside him at the piano feeling rebellious and well on her way to twelve.
He expressed to her his concern that he might be drafted come his own next birthday, as every unmarried man in town between the ages of twenty-one and fifty was required to enlist and bear arms. She was unable for some time to express to him her contradictory feelings about this: She did not want to lose him, her best friend, to the militia, yet she was eager to see him, so tall and broad and handsome, in uniform, defending her and her alone from the barbarians, whoever they might be and whatever they might want to force her to do that she did not want to do with anyone but him.
“They’ll probably draft me despite my poor eyesight,” he said.
“I didn’t know you couldn’t see well,” she said, realizing at the same time that this and not his cigar smoke must be why he was always squinting his deep-set blue eyes, which, as when he smiled, caused tiny whirlpools of dimples to draw her eyes toward the corners of his lips.
“I can see nothing,” he said. “And I can see everything,” he added grandiloquently.
As if it might prove a weapon against the military, he purchased a lorgnette, which he would leave on the piano except when he had her hold it up to his eyes at such times as he actually read or wrote some piece of music instead of merely improvising. When her arm became tired, she would rest her hand against his right cheek and let the joint of her middle finger settle into the dimple there, which slowly moistened with the pressure, and allow the backs of her other fingers the luxury of being simultaneously tickled and prickled by his whiskers.
By now her time with Robert was not limited to their hours together at the piano in his room. He also climbed the stairs to her room on the top floor. There, every night he wasn’t out drinking with his friends, or before he went out drinking with his friends, he entertained her and her little brothers.
Sometimes they would play games like charades or see who could stand on one leg for the longest time or he would clench his hand around some little surprise like candy or a piece of colored glass and try to trick them by saying, “Look!” when there was nothing to be seen and then saying, “Which hand?” so they could guess, though she suspected some kind of benevolent treachery on his part because no matter which hand she chose, there was always something in it for her. Sometimes he told them one riddle after another. But what she liked best was when, having earlier put a lamp on the floor, he would burst in dressed as the ghost of someone who had been killed in the riots outside. He moved grotesquely through the dusky shadows cast by the lamp, causing her brothers to flee to her arms and she to flee to his, so that all of them ended up being hugged together by the ghost himself. He would then sit them down and tell them scary stories, sometimes about brigands in the woods or jungle animals in the forest and sometimes—these were her favorites, which he seemed to save for her alone, when her brothers were busy elsewhere—about doppelgängers.
“I have a double,” he told her. “You have a double. We all have doubles. But most of us don’t know it. We go through life unaware that there is someone else who is also ourselves, exactly like us, except that our double is of the spirit only and we are of the flesh. We are visible and palpable. Our double is invisible and untouchable.”
“And what does our double do?” she asked. “Do you think my double might sometimes practice the piano for me?”
She said this to amuse him. The last thing she might want a double to do would be to take away from her time at the piano. She lived in fear of not being allowed to play, rather than being forced to play too much. When her father wanted to punish her, he kept her from the piano.
Robert did laugh. “No, Zilia, your double can’t play the piano for you. In your case, and yours alone, your double is not your exact replica, because there could be no one else in this world or any other who could play the piano as well as you.”
She was not unaccustomed to such praise. She had played in enough salons to have become quite in demand, and when her father allowed her to accept invitations only to those homes at which there were likely to be in attendance people who could be of genuine use to her career, those who had been rejected sent her not only flattering entreaties but also accompanying gifts, from candies and cakes to earrings and rings and lockets and bracelets and in one case a slender gold chain about which she exclaimed, “They must think I have a neck the size of a cow’s!” when she did not realize, until her stepmother told her, that it was meant to be worn around the waist, beneath her clothing, so that it was taken from her as indecent when it was the one gift she truly wanted.
Sometimes women, and their daughters with them, would, in their servants’ places, deliver the gifts themselves, and it had become the custom for them to ask to fix her hair. People loved her hair. It was dark and soft and fine, and when it was pulled away from her face and piled atop her head or twisted behind in elaborate shapes, her eyes, like an actor’s when the curtains are drawn apart, seemed to grow larger and become more alive. “Striking,” they would say, looking at her. Never “beautiful”—always “striking.” She thought she would play the piano for anyone who called her beautiful, and go anywhere to do it.
But there was no praise like Robert’s. He was some kind of mad genius, the way he would sit at the piano and improvise for hours on end and produce unanticipated changes of key and strange chords she could not manage to find within her own fingers. She often felt a longing for his music. It was not altogether a pleasant longing. She felt the same thing when he was not there, as when his music was not. A missingness, she called it, a grief, like for her distant mother, or her dead brother, or even her own double, who she thought might take from her some of the burden of her life.
“I would like to meet my double,” she told him.
“Oh, no!” he said. He seemed shocked. “Oh, no, you wouldn’t! To meet your double is a sign you will soon die.”
She thought for a moment of pretending to be frightened, so that he might hug her, but she preferred he see her strong. “I don’t believe that,” she said.
“Don’t believe that? But you must. It is true. How can you not believe that?”
“For the very reason you gave me. My double cannot play the piano as well as I. You said so yourself. Therefore, it would have to be my double who died and not me, should we ever meet.”
He hugged her anyway. “Has anyone ever had such faith in her art?”
It was him, not her art, in whom she had faith. It was he who spoke of art as if it were religion. So far as she was concerned, she simply played the piano. It was her purpose on earth. This was not religion but life.
But so was this, being held by her friend, who was indeed her only friend, and feeling it would be impossible for her to have a double because there was no room in the universe for such a feeling as this to be duplicated.
When Robert’s mother in Zwickau sent him his birth certificate, which he was required to show to the
military authorities, Clara asked to see it.
She smoothed it out with her hands and then read it. “‘Robert Alexander Schumann,’” she said. “I don’t believe it.”
“You don’t like my name?”
“I love your name. What I don’t believe is that you actually exist.”
He spoke of trying to get a medical deferment because of his eyesight and a tendency to vertigo, but he was convinced he would be drafted and spoke of escaping either to America or to Twer, in Russia, where he had an uncle.
She desperately wanted him not to go, and at the same time to go with him. She imagined an endless trip, with howling winds and blankets over their laps and all the untold stories he would tell her, and at the end of the trip, when she would be much older than she was now, a piano.
As it turned out, he was not drafted and he did not go away. The revolution was over quickly, at least in Germany, and from what she could tell in hearing her father discuss it with Robert and some of the older students, the freedoms that were being won by the people in England and Belgium and Portugal and Spain and Switzerland had been denied the people of Russia and Poland and Austria and of course Germany. Nothing had changed except for those who had died.
And for her, since she could now make her debut at the Gewandhaus.
The Gewandhaus itself was an old clothing hall, where Leipzig’s linen merchants used to store and sometimes sell their cloth. It had been converted into a concert hall nearly fifty years before, and a local orchestra had been playing there—never very well—in the intervening time.
A Gewandhaus performance represented a significant change in the status of the solo musician. In the past, such artists, no matter the glory of their virtuosity, were primarily household servants who performed at the whim of their wealthy patrons; musicians were paraded out like so many jugglers and tumblers to impress invited guests or on occasion to perform privately for the patron himself, who might have a headache or want to play along upon his very own flute or, if he were truly enlightened, to take a small dose of the profound humility any sensible human being should—but so few do—experience with religious ferocity in the presence of a great musician.