by J. D. Landis
If anyone was on fire, it was she. Without waiting for her father, she rushed into the street out of Monsieur Pleyel’s vast expanse of threatening instruments.
So it was with no small sense of shame and embarrassment that she found herself back there a few nights later, on February 26, for Chopin’s oft-postponed Paris debut, originally scheduled for Christmas day, when Clara wished it had been held so she would not have to be here tonight, hiding her face against her father’s blue sleeve as he pointed among the audience that barely began to occupy the three hundred seats of Monsieur Pleyel’s large concert hall, saying, “My God, there’s Mendelssohn!” “My God, there’s Liszt!” “My God, there’s—look at that nose!—Pixis!” his German the only sound she could understand among what she realized were almost entirely Polish voices, until Chopin himself came out and played upon the smallest piano in the place, a little monochord that belonged to Friedrich Kalkbrenner, his own Variations on ‘Là ci darem.’ She thought they were the most beautiful thing she had ever heard, aside from Herr Schumann’s improvisations, though her father groused that the Variations were not even recognizable as those she played because of the stiff and obstinate nature of Kalkbrenner’s piano.
After the concert, her father wanted to introduce her to all the assembled musicians, so they would know her name and face and prepare one day to tremble before the onslaught of her fingers upon a better keyboard than might be found here in Monsieur Pleyel’s emporium; but Clara, still trying to hide against his frock coat, said, “No, I am not ready,” and once again slipped into the street.
She felt not ready either when he took her once more to hear Chopin, this time at Abbé Bertin’s, where Chopin played his E-Minor Concerto and once again her father sat there criticizing him—him and not even his piano this time, accusing the very Paris that had refused to listen to her play the piano of having made Chopin sloppy and careless in his own playing.
“You are wrong about that,” she whispered, though the piece had ended and the room crackled with applause.
“I am never wrong,” he whispered back.
This time when she left him she headed not for the street but for the artists’ room at the side of the stage.
“You were wonderful, Monsieur Chopin,” she rehearsed in her mind as she walked, wishing she knew how to address the man in Polish but hoping he would, in his solitude after his performance, forgive her ignorance as that of an inexperienced young woman who was on her first journey into the great world.
By the time she knocked on the door and then opened it herself when there was no response, and discovered that Chopin was hardly alone, it was too late for her to retreat.
There he stood, almost frail without his black coat, hardly larger than she, with a beautiful, delicate face and skin so transparent he seemed, like his music, visibly invisible.
Next to him was a very handsome man whom she recognized even though he appeared to have had a strange new haircut, Felix Mendelssohn.
On the other side of Chopin was someone else she recognized, Ferdinand Hiller, who was a bit older than the other two and was known to have been one of Hummel’s finest pupils. But what most intrigued her about Hiller was the story of how he had become the piano teacher of none other than Marie Moke, when she was a student at Madame Daubrée’s school for girls, and of course like everybody else fell in love with her and had to find a place to make love to her and persuaded Berlioz to let him use his apartment, where he took her and made love to her and while he was making love to her Marie was said to have imagined it was Berlioz himself making love to her and so she went right out and seduced Berlioz.
It was as if the very air in Paris bred lovers just as it bred pianists, or at least drew them here, to compete with one another and, if she could believe her father’s assessment of their predilections, to destroy one another. Liszt was in Paris, and Thalberg, Kalkbrenner, Herz, Pixis, Dreyschock, Chopin, Mendelssohn, Hiller, Marie Pleyel, and herself as well, her little self, so eager to play and love and grow into her years and life.
Yet these men before her now in the artists’ room, famous as they were, seemed hardly on the brink of mutual annihilation. They were in their shirtsleeves and appeared to be in the midst of a toast, champagne glasses held high as they turned to stare at her.
“Who have we here?” said Hiller in German-accented French.
“I have never seen such eyes,” said Chopin in what she supposed must be Polish-accented French.
“You look familiar,” said Mendelssohn in perfect French, the first to address her directly.
“You must have seen her on the stage,” said Chopin. “A tear in those eyes would be visible from the last row.”
“Gentlemen,” said Hiller, drawing them back to their toast.
“Excuse us,” Mendelssohn said to her.
“May his soul rest in peace,” said Hiller.
The three young men clinked their glasses and then drank down their champagne with one tilt each of their splendid heads.
Somebody must have died. She couldn’t imagine who. She hoped it wasn’t a member of any of their immediate families, for that would have made inappropriate the drinking of champagne.
“I’m sorry,” she said, testing her French and her nerve with as few words as possible.
Now they all looked at her with the slightly pinched faces of people who have swallowed bubbles too abruptly.
“No need to apologize. We were merely drinking to the passing of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,” said Mendelssohn, in whose own eye a tear was suddenly visible. “Perhaps you have heard of him.”
“Goethe’s dead!”
“Fetch that girl a chair,” said Chopin to no one in particular.
Clara shook her head. She didn’t want to sit down, though she wouldn’t have minded someone’s arm to lean on. If Chopin hadn’t looked so fragile, hadn’t been renowned not only for his playing but also for the fact that he was cared for by fourteen physicians in Paris alone, she might have clung to him, might even have taken his hand in case some of the power of his playing might pass into her. It was common knowledge that he had left Poland on the eve of the revolution and had been in anguish ever since he had learned in Stuttgart, while on his way to Paris, that Warsaw had fallen to the Russians.
“I played for Herr Goethe just weeks ago,” she said.
When they looked at her confusedly, she added, “The piano.”
“But you are so young,” said Chopin.
“She is not,” said Mendelssohn. “I played for Goethe when I was twelve. How old are you?”
“Twelve.”
“You see!” said Mendelssohn.
“Goethe didn’t mention you had played for him, Herr Mendelssohn.”
“You see,” he said to the others. “She knows who I am.”
“Of course I do,” she said.
“It’s over ten years ago,” he said. “I played Bach fugues for him and then I improvised and then I played Mozart. After that, he called me his David and himself my Saul—probably because my teacher had introduced me by saying that while I was the son of a Jew I was no Jew myself. ‘I haven’t heard you yet today,’ Goethe would say to me, ‘come cheer me up with your playing,’ rather like Count Keyserlingk calling young Goldberg to him to play the variations Papa Bach had written to protect the count from the demons in the mind that are said to rob men of their sleep, though I must say I have no trouble sleeping and never have.”
“I would have thought as much,” said Chopin, who looked as if he slept as poorly as Herr Schumann.
“Goethe kissed me, once every morning and twice every afternoon,” Mendelssohn said to her. “Did he kiss you as well?”
“No,” she answered, “but he did put his hand on my fanny.”
All three men laughed, Hiller being the first to stop when he said to Mendelssohn, “Watch out for this one. She could be another Delphine.”
“Who is Delphine?” she asked.
“Someone much older than you,”
said Mendelssohn.
“Not much,” said Hiller.
“She meant little to me—Delphine von Schauroth”—her name crawling from Mendelssohn’s small mouth as if merely to utter it brought pain to his heart.
“I believe you wrote your G-Minor Concerto for her?” Chopin seemed exasperated at the lies love spoke.
“Only because she’s a wonderful pianist. And are you a wonderful pianist?” Mendelssohn asked her.
Where was her father when she needed him?
“You might judge for yourself if you could hear me, but I cannot get a hearing in this city.”
“Then you must indeed be a wonderful pianist,” said Chopin. “What can one expect in a city whose music is controlled by the likes of Cherubini and Lesueur and Paër, who taken together, heaven forbid, are over four thousand years old, and a city that celebrates the operas of Hérold and Auber and Boïeldieu? But tell me your name. I’ll get Kalkbrenner to have you play at his house. He owes me a favor.”
“You owe that thief yourself more likely,” said Mendelssohn, who was known throughout Paris for having accused Kalkbrenner of stealing themes from Hiller and, worse, for writing in what Mendelssohn called the fervidly lachrymose key of F-sharp minor.
“Not true at all!” Chopin seemed indignant. “Kalkbrenner introduced me to Pleyel; I agreed to endorse Pleyel’s pianos; Pleyel gave me a piano; only by happenstance is it the most sensitive piano I’ve ever played. When I told this to Liszt, he said, ‘Sensitive! One brings a woman to her climax not by tickling her but by banging her. Pianos and women run with equal haste from men who proclaim their sensitivity.’”
Before he went on, and apparently to silence Mendelssohn, who appeared to have something to say if only he could find words to fill his wide-open mouth, Chopin said to Clara, “I trust you are young enough to have no idea whatsoever Liszt was talking about, though if you do then I apologize for his very insensitivity both to pianos and to women.”
Before Clara could respond, as unsure as she was whether she should admit that she felt sure she knew the meaning of a woman’s climax though she had never before actually heard it mentioned aloud, Chopin continued with his explanation for the discomfort he felt at the exploitation of his name. “Who is the only one in this whole equation that comes off without an obligation yet with two others in his debt? Kalkbrenner! I am second to none in my admiration for his playing—the rest of you are all zeros next to him, and so am I; he is the only one whose shoelaces I am not worthy of tying. Nonetheless, in this matter, he owes me. Or do you think I actually enjoy seeing my name used next to the word ‘ravishing’ in La France Musicale in order to help Monsieur Pleyel sell his pianos? I would never use the word ‘ravishing’ about anything! First they prostitute us by tempting us mercilessly to endorse their products, and then they put into our mouths words wholly out of keeping with our manner of discourse in the real world.”
“Liszt doesn’t seem to mind endorsing Pierre Erard’s pianos,” said Hiller, referring to Erard’s proprietorship that had begun six years earlier when he sent Liszt off to England virtually attached to the Erard newly invented double-escapement piano, upon which the boy played so impressively for George IV that the king, dizzy from trying to follow the flight of Liszt’s hands over the full seven octaves, proclaimed the Hungarian wunderkind the superior of the Hebrew Moscheles. But it had been here in Paris, even earlier, when Liszt had been her age, only twelve, that he had been proclaimed by the public itself the ninth wonder of the world. To this day one might buy in music shops replicas of his twelve-year-old head made from the cast fashioned by Franz Joseph Gall himself to further his phrenological study of genius. Clara remembered how the false report of Liszt’s death had reached even Leipzig, several years ago, when he had disappeared from public for two years after the father of his lover, Caroline de Saint-Criq, had found Liszt with his daughter and forbidden him ever to see her again. Herr Schumann had helped her read the French in the Etoile obituary. Liszt had been fourteen at the time he had been torn from the arms of his love. He “died” two years later, not having been seen in public in all that time of his mourning for his lost Caroline. In two years Clara would be fourteen. It was Liszt’s example, she believed, that gave her license to love.
“Liszt would endorse a pessary if the woman to whom it belonged allowed him to test it,” said Chopin.
“Hush!” said Mendelssohn. “The child!”
If she had known what a pessary was, she would have protested Mendelssohn’s attempt to protect a delicacy in her temperament that she was determined to obliterate. She was not a child any longer. But neither was she wholly a woman. She was caught between the two, full of longing for what as yet could only be imagined.
“You inquired as to my name,” she said to Chopin, seeming to change the subject but in fact determined to turn it toward herself. “I am Clara Wieck.”
“I knew you looked familiar!” said Mendelssohn. “I have seen your portrait. But where?”
“My father leaves them at the homes we visit.”
“You see!” said Chopin.
“See what?” asked Hiller.
“That all we pianists are forced to prostitute ourselves. I endorse pianos. This young woman passes out her likeness.”
“I don’t do anything like that,” said Mendelssohn.
“You don’t need to,” said Chopin.
“Except kiss Goethe’s ass,” said Hiller.
“Touché!” called Chopin.
“And get a new haircut,” added Hiller at Mendelssohn’s expense.
“That’s not fair!” Mendelssohn’s hands went to his head to cover his hair.
“What do you think of his haircut?” Hiller asked her.
“I’d rather not say,” she said.
“If you’re as fine a pianist as you are a diplomat, you must play gracefully indeed,” said Chopin.
“It’s all Meyerbeer’s fault,” said Mendelssohn, his hands still over his hair.
Chopin called her over to him and pretended to whisper in her ear, though it was clear he meant the others to hear. “Somebody told him he looked like Giacomo Meyerbeer, so he went out and immediately had his hair cut in order to assassinate the resemblance. Are you familiar with Meyerbeer?”
Chopin smelled sweet. He didn’t look like a man who would smell sweet, because he was so pale, almost wasted. She wondered if perhaps this fragrance rose in the aftermath of his playing the piano, a kind of efflorescence of his art through his skin.
In answer to his question, she said, “My father took me to visit Monsieur Meyerbeer in the hope that he would arrange a public concert for me. That he has not done, but he did give us tickets to Robert le diable.”
“Just like Meyerbeer,” said Hiller.
“And what did you think of the opera?” asked Chopin.
“The chorus sang through megaphones,” she replied.
“Ever the diplomat,” said Chopin.
“Megaphones indeed!” said Mendelssohn. “And you wonder why I had my hair cut!”
“Let us at least see your hair again,” said Hiller.
“No!” Mendelssohn pressed his hands more firmly over the top of his head.
“After him!” said Hiller, seeming to direct this call to battle as much to her as to Chopin.
But it was Chopin who was first upon Mendelssohn, moving like the whippet he would have most resembled had lethargy and a kind of physical gloom not appeared to have cleaved him to the floor.
Hiller joined Chopin as the two of them tugged at Mendelssohn’s hands until they had succeeded in pulling them from his head, at which point Mendelssohn fell to his hands and knees and Chopin vaulted over his back, and then Hiller did the same, and Mendelssohn rose and vaulted over Hiller, all three of them yelping boyishly and continuing to laugh as Mendelssohn called out, “Your turn, Fräulein Wieck,” and she pulled up her white dress from around her ankles and more acrobatically, she thought, than the others leapfrogged over Chopin, wondering if thi
s resembled perhaps an orgy and laughing for the first time in Paris as she had not laughed since she had left home and Herr Schumann had appeared in her room running around like a ghost afraid of his own malevolently invisible shadow.
So it was that Papa found her, playing like the girl she was with the older brothers she did not have, these superb, and in Mendelssohn’s case famous, musicians who were no further out of one end of their teenage years than she was from being received into the other. She knew her father well enough to know that whatever stern reproach might have risen to his throat was immediately softened into flattery when he realized who her playmates were.
As the four of them straightened their clothes and introductions were made, her father said to Chopin, “I might have taken your concerto for something by a pupil of mine back in Germany, Robert Schumann. I found it wonderful myself but could not help noticing that it was much too difficult for the ears of tonight’s public audience. It is hardly in the fashion of today’s music. And for that, sir, I congratulate you.”