by J. D. Landis
It was a perfect display of her father’s inability to apply the balm of praise without first inflicting the sting of censure. But at least he had not been so impolitic as to berate Chopin for having failed to receive him and her at home.
In the minutes that remained before he took his daughter back to their hotel, the talk among the four men was of the cholera that was said to be on its way to Paris.
Clara for her part was ready to die. She stood as close to Chopin as she dared, exulting in the sweet smell of his genius and the image in her mind of her leaping over his back.
True to his word, Chopin indeed spoke about her to Friedrich Kalkbrenner, who because of the flawless elegance of his playing was her father’s favorite pianist, at least until Clara had played for him at his house. There, her father got into a fight with Monsieur Kalkbrenner after Madame Kalkbrenner had said that Clara would be ruined as a pianist if she continued to study in Germany, and her father had replied that that would never happen because “I shall never let her out of my hands,” words that sent a shiver up Clara’s spine, as well they might any girl’s. Then Kalkbrenner joined the conversation in defense of his beautiful young French wife. (Clara had noticed how common it seemed for rather homely, sometimes downright ugly, musicians to have pretty wives, as if the making of music might by itself create a desire that otherwise would no more have reared its head than the goddess of the moon would bathe in the Dead Sea.) “In Germany,” said Kalkbrenner, with the waxy, hardened smile Heine compared to that found on the lips of a mummified Egyptian pharaoh, “all pianists play in that groping, sprawling, scrambling Viennese style, and when they come to Paris”—at this he looked directly at her—“they bring that style with them just as surely as they do the silly ribbons in their hair.” Her father turned red as he screamed at Kalkbrenner in his own house that his methods of teaching his daughter were as far from the Viennese as Kalkbrenner’s taste in furniture was from the comme il faut. Kalkbrenner merely laughed and turned away from his guests without another word.
“Did I use that term incorrectly?” asked her father as he pulled her toward the door.
“I have no idea,” she responded.
“I saw him kiss you when you finished playing,” he said—“what did he say when he kissed you?”
“He said I had le plus grand talent.”
“Even I know what that means. Do you suppose he would write it down for us so it would at least be of some use?”
“No, I do not, Papa,” she said, happy to have an excuse to leave anybody’s house before midnight.
There was no one to support her but Paganini, who had arrived in Paris without any teeth, which he blamed upon a dentist in Prague, and said he would perform with her, but only, he joked in a strange whispering tone that made him sound as if his larynx were disintegrating, if she would play with his son, Achilles. She joked back that if he would allow her to play with Achilles, she would not require that he, Paganini, appear with her. Her father did not understand her wit and nearly exploded on the spot, but Paganini understood her perfectly and said that he would make two appearances with her for her kindness to his son, if only they could find a hall that would book the two of them. Her father didn’t understand Paganini’s wit either and actually said, “Oh, you underestimate your fame, sir,” to which Paganini replied, giving Clara so large a wink that she could discern it from behind his dark-blue glasses, “No, I don’t.”
But Paganini was soon thereafter forced to withdraw, which he did with a considerable and sincere expression of regret, for he had become ill, though not, luckily, with the cholera that now pressed upon Paris seemingly from all sides and emptied the city of all those who could afford to flee the way a summer heat wave drives the rich to the breezes off the sea.
She was scheduled finally to appear before the public at large at the Hôtel de Ville on April 9, at six francs a ticket, with many gratis invitations sent out personally by her father proclaiming (with the French approved by the clerk in their hotel): Mademoiselle Clara Wieck, jeune pianiste allemande, âgée de 12 ans.
Virtually no one responded. Mendelssohn had fled to England, Hiller to Frankfurt, Liszt to Switzerland, and Chopin into seclusion in his house on the Cité Bergère.
Those Parisians who were left were not the sort who would go to a recital in the least plagued of times, and now they had taken to rioting in the streets and hurting no one but themselves and their compeers in their frustration at being unable to afford to follow the affluent into retreat from the invisible—until it struck—malevolence of this terrible disease.
And so when the management of the Hôtel de Ville canceled her engagement for lack of response, not to mention fear of mingling with whatever fools might actually attend, she was offered by Franz Stöpel the tiny hall at his music school, where, upon a piano munificently provided her by Pierre Erard from his shop on the rue du Mail, she played magnificently for a handful of people, whose names are lost to us but whose departed souls are among the most blessed wherever they may be, for they were present when this young German pianist, aged twelve, for the first time in her life played her entire program from memory and then improvised for them a music that was never written down and never heard again.
Four days later, she and her father escaped from Paris, he still grumbling, she expectant with bliss.
Leipzig
MAY 1, 1832
Now, you are my right hand.
Robert Schumann
The very day she had returned with her father, after seven months away, including an unscheduled fourteen-day cholera quarantine in Saarbruck, Alwin and Gustav had come knocking on Robert’s door, screaming, “Clara’s home, come quick! Clara’s home, come now!” He immediately regretted that he had not visited her brothers more often in her absence. He was fond of them and did not understand why they seemed almost to have no meaning, no existence, apart from their sister. He wondered if they could sense the presence of Christel in his room, though she hadn’t been there in several days.
He followed them home. Or, more accurately, was dragged behind them, as each had him by a hand and pulled him through the narrow Leipzig streets and the dark little Leipzig alleys that opened finally into the huge cobbled market square, across which the boys ran fast enough to make Robert feel in his lungs the curdled accumulation of the pleasure of his cigars. Goethe, so recently dead—Robert enjoyed the thought that the last musician the master might have heard was Clara and the last wheedling, death-hastening voice her father’s—had called Leipzig the “little Paris,” wholly appropriate in that Robert should now be running through it toward her who had just returned from its actuality.
He found her in the kitchen, sharpening knives. Her back was to him, as it often was when she played the piano, and he was struck at how there was the same competence in her movement, the knife in her right hand, the whetstone secured by her left, the bones of her shoulders riding rhythmically through the soft fabric of her dress and the wisps of her hair that had come free of their ribbon grazing her neck as the music from the knife opened him up to her.
So intensely did she seem to be performing this most kitchenly, domestic, of tasks that he was afraid to speak to her, for fear she might do injury to herself with the knife whose blade threw the day’s fading sunlight back at him each time she turned it over in her hand. He simply stood watching her, engrossed in her movements and wondering how it could be that she could not feel his presence when he felt hers, quite apart from her visibility, so keenly.
It was only when she raised the knife toward her head—a gesture he had practiced playfully, unconsciously, if always knifelessly, as if to slit his throat—that he announced his presence, with a gasp.
She turned around and pressed her sleeve against her forehead, wiping away the perspiration from her effort at honing the knife blade but leaving her arm as a shelter over her eyes as she looked at him.
He found it impossible to say anything to her. She was a stranger to whom he had not been
properly introduced. During the seven months of her absence he had withdrawn from the world as he never had before, living alone for the first time, seeing almost no one aside from Christel and Dorn, his teacher, and a woman at a window, and now and then some men he knew in a tavern where he would speak only when drunk and then cease to speak entirely when even drunker, alone with his music and his wrecked hand. Now here she was, returned, and the world with her, opening a door back into existence through which he found himself unable to enter.
Harry Heine, in Paris, had written in an article about her that she might be taken for nothing more than a charming little girl of twelve, but if you looked more closely, you saw in the small, pretty face a peculiarly voracious glance and a wistful mouth that opened into a mocking smile. She excited in Heine a strange feeling, about which he used the word “confess,” though he could not, or would not, confess what this feeling was.
Thus was Heine once more linked to him, through this shared desire to possess Clara somehow, to break through the grip that music had upon her and thereby to impose themselves upon the story of her life. It was a story Heine envisioned would be “woven out of joy and pain.”
Robert sensed a shyness in her now, this little girl who had always encircled him with her exuberance and teased him with the irony of her childhood. Language, not to mention girlish shrieks and laughter, had poured out of her at any given moment when she was not at the piano, as if her inability to talk had survived until that same moment. But now she could say nothing. The two of them stood there in the kitchen staring at one another, shrinking the half year of their separation into this astounded silence.
When finally she lowered the knife, he could see that the sleeve of her dress was wet and there were tiny beads of sweat on her upper lip, at which she caught him looking. She used her bottom lip to dry the top.
He didn’t know where to look and so looked away. As soon as his eyes had left her, she walked off. He was tempted to follow as he might have done months ago before the Paris trip, howling like a ghost and breathing like a demon in pursuit of his giggling prey. But he remained where he had been standing, looking back at the space she had occupied and at the knife on the table that had moments before been in her grip.
He was not surprised when she returned. He felt he had willed her back.
She handed him a narrow package, in which he discovered a silk tie from a shop in Paris whose name meant nothing to him and a note in her hand:
Dear Herr Schumann:
Here is something to catch the soup I shall make you. Votre amie,
Clara Wieck
He could say nothing. Her eyes pleaded for him to speak, but he could not.
He turned and, with the tie draped over his wrist, walked away.
He was closing the door of the kitchen when finally she spoke.
“I would like to eat some tripe, Monsieur!”
He was charmed to hear in her German a French accent, which Leipzig would soon enough, he knew, drive out of her.
Leipzig
MAY 28, 1832
“It has pleased or it has not pleased,” people say;
as if there were nothing better than to please people.
Robert Schumann
He wore the tie she’d brought him from Paris. Wieck’s anger with him over the injury he had done his hand was assuaged at least in part by his Opus 2, the Papillons, which had been published during Wieck and Clara’s absence and that Wieck proclaimed scintillating and original.
Robert told him the Papillons represented the beginning of the destruction of the sonata. The old music had pretended that there was some form to man’s existence on this earth, a symmetry in which exposition and development appertain to recapitulation and coda, a structure amid the constant destruction, a neat development where one thing led to another in the progress of the universal soul, and that music sought to mirror this wholly imaginary, ridiculously idealistic, configuration. The fact was that in the world, all things, like all beings, were alone, discrete; and one thing—everything—led to nothing, just as all music led ultimately to the silence out of which it had been born.
The Papillons were poems in sound. He had been inspired by the masked ball at the end of Jean Paul’s Time of the Young, with a bit of Goethe’s funeral masque from Wilhelm Meister, when Mignon, who insists upon dressing as a boy, is robbed of her energy and her life as a consequence of being stripped of her male clothing. In Jean Paul’s work, the brothers attend the ball each dressed as the other so that the outgoing Vult might win the heart of the angelic Vina for the shy Walt, and he does, but he loves her too, and so to avoid betraying his brother, he departs forever, alone. Once the low D in Robert’s music has been held beneath meandering harmonies for twenty-six measures, the clock in the tower finally strikes six, the sound of the carnival is silenced, and the single being that Walt and Vult had represented is divided forever against itself.
It was through this music that Wieck inadvertently brought Robert and his daughter back together, for he insisted Clara learn the piece just as he insisted that Robert play it for the guests at his musical soirée on May 28.
The music came slowly into Clara.
“Your hand is too heavy,” Robert told her.
“Because of the pianos in Paris,” she replied.
“You play like a hussar.”
“And you look like one. You should shave that ridiculous mustache.”
“It makes me look older.”
“Then perhaps I’ll grow one.”
“It would certainly improve your appearance.”
“Then why has it not done so with you?”
He could not teach her the music. She was uncertain of the rhythms, confused by the harmonies, and ignorant of the meaning. All the pieces but the simple third (which he, in his passion to bestow upon the ephemeral the substantiation found in the very act of naming, called “Vult”) continued to elude her. She became anxious over her failure and cold as he tried to explain and capricious as he attempted to flatter her and whiny as he showed her how it might be done, “my nine fingers to your ten.”
She was, he concluded, too young for his music.
And he was too old, or too injured, or too frightened.
He told her father he would not play at the party.
Wieck shook his head in disgust. “Then Clara will play your Papillons.”
“How dare you use her to threaten me?”
“How dare you use her to threaten me?” Wieck replied, leaving Robert to wonder if between them they might divide Clara forever against herself.
On the night of the soirée, when Clara was about to play, Robert separated himself and his wineglass from a group of men to whose conversation he had been pretending to listen and sat down next to Agnes Carus.
“What an interesting tie.” As she fingered the silk, the back of her hand rested against his chest.
“Clara brought it from Paris.”
“Look, Ernst,” she said to her husband on her other side, “how this tie brings out the blue in Robert’s eyes.”
Dr. Carus looked first at Robert, then at his wife. “And look how you bring out the red in his cheeks, my dear. Perhaps it is the cut of your dress. As Talleyrand said, it is impossible to show more and reveal less.”
Robert wanted to hide his face in the very bosom her husband was so inaccurately maligning, to evade the embarrassment of Dr. Carus’s distressingly nonchalant acknowledgment of the passion Robert felt for his wife and also to touch in reality, after an infinity of caresses in fantasy, the skin-burstingly perfect breasts of his A-flat spirit, his very Leonore, whom he would like to dress up like a boy so she might steal him, as Beethoven’s Leonore does her husband, from the prison of his life.
Clara appeared then, a little girl in white with her hair in Dutch braids, her thin ankles flashing above her long shoes because she had grown too tall for her dress, and her own breasts discernible perhaps only to those who had known her as the almost invisibly thin child
who nonetheless drew to her then, as she did now, all the attention in a room.
“I shall play for you the Papillons, twelve short pieces written by my friend Robert Schumann, who is sitting among you now unless his fear of hearing me ruin his work has driven him away.” As she delivered this strange little speech, she stared directly into his eyes, her expression at once confrontational and convivial.
Most of the audience laughed politely, including Agnes, who, just as Clara began to play the rising octave scale in D major of “Larventanz,” whispered, “I must see you later, in private.” Such promise as was held by this demand, which was accompanied by the blithe touch of the outside of her hand upon the outside of his thigh, was extinguished by the sound of Clara playing his music.
What had been heavy in practice was now mercurially light. What had been slovenly was graceful. What had been ignorant of his intentions was now uncannily divinatory. She played the music as he would have liked to have been able to play it and would never have been able to play it even if he’d managed to stretch his fingers to the width of the keyboard.
And she played it from memory, as she had told him she had played an entire recital in Paris, which was one thing, however novel, to do in France and quite another in Germany, where adherence to the text was expected not only in how a piece was played but also in how one sat while playing it. But he could see that the absence of the score had freed her from the need to lock her eyes upon it no matter how well she might know it and to anticipate the turning of the page, whether by herself or another, with the anxiety that often made pianists raise their arms and shoulders as if they were ducks attempting to rise out of murky waters.