by J. D. Landis
Dr. Reuter not only removed his wire glasses but took the added precaution of closing his eyes. “You can’t possibly mean…”
“Yes. I do. I was in love with her. I was in love with her even though I could never forgive her for replacing me.”
Dr. Reuter opened his eyes and squinted at Robert. “By marrying your brother, I assume you mean.”
“No. By having a baby and giving him my name and then killing him.”
“Your sister-in-law murdered your nephew!” As Dr. Reuter spoke, he pushed his chair back from his desk until, had he pushed any more, he might have fallen out the window of his office—which fortunately was on the ground floor, precisely the reason Robert had chosen to visit him in particular and not one of his other doctors whose offices might happen to be up a flight or two.
Robert nodded. “By making doubles of us.”
“Doubles! I’ve had enough of this romantic claptrap, Robert. You suffer from quite concrete symptoms but you seek reasons for them in the most phantasmal corridors of quackery. You would no doubt prefer me to prescribe a cure that was written on a tablet somewhere centuries ago by a wizard in a pointed cap. You have insomnia. You have no outlet for your sexual desires but an occasional whore and fantasies of incest. You live alone and keep alone and bang away at your music to the exclusion of any other activity and any other congress with a world that appears unable or unwilling to listen to the music you make. And if you are, as you claim, suicidal, it is because you have reduced the entire world to yourself and when you stop to look at yourself you realize, to employ your own words, that you no longer exist.” Dr. Reuter paused to take a breath and at the same time smiled ever so slightly and moved his chair back until his short legs were under his desk so that once more their inability to reach the floor was obscured. “Am I wrong about all this?” he asked rhetorically as he replaced his glasses on his huge nose.
“You are brilliant,” answered Robert. “I do no longer exist.”
“And are you ready to hear what you must do if you are to be cured?”
“I am ready.” Robert reached out his hand, but he was not fast enough, for Dr. Reuter moved both of his onto his lap beneath his desk.
Dr. Reuter looked past Robert to the small, dark painting of Frau Reuter that, far from the diplomas that seemed to swim around the doctor’s head like so many ducks, graced the wall most distant from his desk. “You must get married.”
Robert laughed. “I would prefer to take some herbs.”
As Dr. Reuter rose from his chair and somewhat warily offered Robert his hand in a gesture of both reconciliation and dismissal, he ordered, “Take a wife.”
Part Two
Before the Wedding
Leipzig
MARCH 13, 1834
I will be irritated with her for the rest of my life.
Friedrich Wieck
“I no longer want my kittens,” Clara said.
“Your kittens are no longer kittens.” Grimacing, her father watched the three of them—Mittens, Fluffy, and Agnes, thank goodness for the small favor that they were all of one gender—as they clawed at Clara’s white nubby bedspread like fretful pianists lacerating chords.
Clementine bent forward to look at them more closely. “If they are not kittens, what are they? Dogs?”
“Cats,” said her husband with a patience he bestowed upon no one else.
“I no longer want them,” Clara repeated.
“What would you have me do with them? Drown them?”
“Oh, my,” said Clementine.
“Do you wish to drown them?” said Clara.
“What is the matter with you?” asked her father.
Clara smiled. “With me?”
She lay beneath her cotton flannel sheets and her thick woolen blanket and her white bedspread, still able to feel upon her thighs and tummy the rise and fall of the cats’ paws, from which she took a pleasure that was no longer adequate.
“Do you have any idea what time it is?” her father asked.
“What time is it?” she answered.
“How late do you plan to sleep?”
“How can I sleep if you suddenly appear in my room and talk to me?”
“How can I sleep if you persist in behaving this way?”
“Are you having trouble sleeping, my dear?” Clementine reached out to touch him, but he shook his head and caused her hand to retreat back to the knitting in her lap, a winter cap for him that was too late in the season and suspiciously the size and shape of the bald spot that was removing his hair with the precision and the indifference of a scalpel.
“What way?” Clara asked, fully aware, even if he was not, that she responded to every question of his with another question. She had discovered this was the best way both to avoid answering unpleasant questions and to vex the questioner.
“Must you force me to tell you?” he nearly bellowed.
“Why else would you have come here, if not to tell me?”
“We came here to get you out of bed. Do you have any idea what time it is?”
“What time is it then?”
He drew his timepiece out of his waistcoat pocket, making a great show of flicking its cover up with the nail of his thumb, which was the only nail a pianist allowed to grow long enough even for so modest a purpose, and staring at the face as if it had somehow stolen valuable hours from his life. “Well after nine o’clock,” he announced.
“In the morning?”
“My God, child!” He rose from the small upholstered (with the most idealized ballerinas and balloons, which Clara felt she had long ago outgrown and the cats had long ago punctured and pitted) chair so abruptly that it fell over backward, causing Clementine to miss a loop. Not pausing to right the chair, her father went to the window and pulled back the heavy curtains, first one side and then the other. “Morning,” he announced gravely.
“Can it really be so early?” Clara sank farther beneath her bedclothes.
“So early!” He thumped back toward the center of her room and hesitated at his fallen chair and seemed to decide he would lose his (wholly illusory) upper hand should he stoop to place it upright. So he proceeded on with even greater forte in his feet until he stood pressed against the very footboard of her bed and took the kind of deep and pious breath she knew by now announced a tirade.
“You are an inconsiderate child, arrogant, domineering, contrary, negligent, stubborn, cantankerous, disobedient, rude, nasty, lazy, and, with not the slightest reason to be so, vain. What is to become of you, God only knows. You never get out of bed before nine o’clock. You never appear among the human race before ten-thirty, though what you’ve done with that time is invisible to any of us with the slightest good taste in clothing and hair styles. And then you spend the rest of what little is left of the morning receiving your visitors, most of whom want nothing from you but the glow of your fame, which I must warn you is barely visible any longer. But still you let one or another take you out to lunch. And when you finally get home from that you complain and complain when I ask you to play the piano because I am interrupting your thoughts about what theater you are going to go to after supper and what men are going to be there. And when I do force you to spend time at the piano, all you come away with are complaints about how hard my instruments are to play, with the result that you are ruining my business not only insofar as it concerns your hopeless career but also my selling my pianos in the first place. You are, in short, thoroughly impossible, and you make me thoroughly sick.”
“Oh, my,” said Clementine, whose instinctive sympathy for Clara as a female under attack was almost wholly eclipsed by her gratitude that she herself had not, at least as yet, been forced to suffer such a scolding as this from the man she loved and from the man who, she knew, loved his daughter more than he would ever love his wife.
“Now get out of bed and get dressed and go downstairs and play the piano as you did for all the years of your life until now.” He leaned forward and took Clara’s bedspread in both his ha
nds as if to pull it down.
Clara did the same with her hands, as if to keep it up.
“Are you refusing to leave this bed?”
“Are you unaware that I am naked beneath my covers?”
“Naked!” Clementine shrieked, so it was impossible to tell if Friedrich Wieck’s hands flew off the bed in response to his daughter’s words or his wife’s whoop.
“Don’t you sleep naked?” Clara addressed her first words to her stepmother.
“Not since—,” began Clementine, when her husband stopped her by saying, “For the love of God, no!”
“—I was your age,” Clementine could not help but continue, damn the consequences.
“Shall I get out of bed now?” asked Clara with a feigned innocence she found it absolutely delightful to assume.
As Clara lifted the top half of her body from the bed with the bedspread and blanket falling away and only the sheet locked tightly under the pits of both arms, her father finally retreated and barked, “Let’s go!” to his wife, who seemed glued to her chair in anticipation of sharing at least this most superficial of intimacies with her stepdaughter.
“I promise to reform, Papa,” Clara called out as her bedroom door was closing. “Please tell Herr Banck to wait for me in Robert’s old room.”
As soon as they had closed the door behind them, Clara sank back into bed and, laughing, kicked the kittens off.
Leipzig
APRIL 3, 1834
Once you were my feminine beloved,
Now you are my masculine beloved.
Robert Schumann
Though it was the evening of the publication day of the first issue of New Journal of Music, and their colleagues in the magazine were no doubt celebrating at The Coffee Tree, Robert was home with no one but Ludwig Schunke for company.
They had moved together to 21 Burgstrasse, on the ground floor in deference to Robert’s continuing fear of heights, about which Ludwig had commented only half ironically, “It’s not the fear of heights, but the fear of depths, that makes a man tedious.”
Schunke had appeared several months before at Krause’s Cellar, out of nowhere, “like a star,” as Robert was to write in the magazine, though he had arrived, as it were, from everywhere, also like a star to those whose feet are fixed in mundane soil. Plagued by consumption, told to prepare himself to die, he had left Paris, where he was considered a pianist the equal of Liszt and Chopin, at the very end of the cholera scare, only when it was healthy to remain, and then tried Vienna, Prague, Dresden, and finally here, Leipzig, where he fell in with the boys of David and moved in with Robert.
For the first time in his life, Robert had found himself part of a circle of friends, not merely the solitary companion of another solitary dreamer. They met regularly in one tavern or another to discuss art in general and their plans for a new music magazine in particular. They sometimes called themselves Davids, because they agreed they were united against the Philistines and because they were taken, for one reason or another—aesthetic, carnal, or merely metaphysical—with the image of “a goodly-to-look-at boy of beautiful countenance” (so many musicians were homely little men with large ears) who was also a “cunning man with a harp.” Perhaps they would agree, should a poll be taken, that a woman’s form was most desired; but a man’s was most admired.
While a student at Heidelberg, Robert had heard the term Philister applied by his fellow academics to the townspeople in the customary way in which those being educated insist upon demeaning those who have the misfortune to abide within earreach of that education. For Robert and his friends, however, the Philistines had become those who did not merely dwell in but ruled the world of music, of art, of everything in which men expressed themselves and sought to win approval by appealing to the admiration for superficial vulgarity that was surely man’s greatest failing. Yet Robert was embarrassed by such blatant biblical symbolism. He preferred to think of himself and his group only as simple warriors, not kinged, and if named at all, named something playful and obscure.
He always made it a point to sit next to Johann Lyser, a deaf artist who was convinced that his drawings of their Leipzig meetings in Krause’s Cellar or The Coffee Tree would one day assume the eminence of Titian’s Last Supper; not the painting from the 1540s, in which nearly everyone seems intent upon listening to a pontificating and, to Lyser, mundanely divine Jesus, but the one finished twenty years later in which several discussions are being carried on at once and Jesus, like Robert, is the doomed spiritual leader who comforts with his silence and, as upon Lyser’s own back with the hand not holding a glass of beer, the occasional touch.
Robert enjoyed the sensation of watching the chaos of their gatherings become the imperturbation of art. Every once in a while Lyser halted the fricative twitter of his pen on paper and looked sideways into Robert’s eyes and directed them toward his drawing.
Here was the pianist Julius Knorr in all his theological, Mephistophelian grandeur, black beard, twisted black cigar, leaning back in his chair so his clubfoot in its peculiar black boot might find room on the table among the dozens of beer glasses and champagne flutes and ale tankards and coffee cups and ashtrays and books and coins and snow-soaked scarves and hats, his pale face as coyly expectant of reward as when he had within the last hour quoted Stendhal on romanticism as the progenitor of art that gives people the most profound pleasure and classicism as the progenitor of art that gives the most profound pleasure to their great-grandfathers. It was Knorr who, Clara’s claims notwithstanding, had been the first in Germany to play Chopin’s Variations on “Là ci darem,” a fact that Robert had bribed Knorr with a box of Caribbean cigars never to reveal to her.
Here, in contrast, was Karl Banck, blond, evilly handsome, who wrote songs and then sang them himself, distressingly well. Banck had been hired by Wieck to work with Clara. For some reason he always seemed to be singing with Clara whenever Robert visited. Robert found this annoying not because he suspected that the love songs they sang together were being sung to one another but because he himself did not sing well at all. He felt shut out by their art, not to mention the fact that they went right on singing even when he popped his head into the room Banck sometimes lodged in, the very room over Reichstrasse that had been Robert’s own in those days when Clara would sit beside him silently as he wove the two of them together within the detours of his improvisations.
Here was Joseph Mainzer, who actually had been a priest and then became a revolutionary and finally a teacher of voice.* Robert wished it were Mainzer and not Karl Banck who had been hired to work with Clara, for he was so jovially homely that he claimed to have quit the priesthood because he found he didn’t need a vow of chastity in order to be forced to practice it.
Here was Ludwig Böhner, at one time so famous a composer that he was the actual model for Hoffmann’s Johannes Kreisler, who by now had been brought so low by drink he could barely dress himself; and yet he had prevailed upon Robert’s worship of Hoffmann to have himself named the magazine’s “foreign correspondent,” prepared to travel, he said, wherever the beer is best and the music impetuous.
And here, among all the rest of these arguing, table-pounding, music-worshipping, iconoclastic, Christmas-fat romantics, was Friedrich Wieck himself, progressive in the ear—he admired the music of Beethoven and Schubert if not quite yet that of Chopin—and retrograde in the heart, with the result that he was that most dangerous of aesthetes, an avant-garde bourgeois.
Yet all of them believed with Schiller that if man were ever to solve the problem of politics in actual practice, he would have to approach it through the problem of the aesthetic, because it was only through beauty that man made his way to freedom. It was not the beauty of the merely decorous or genial. It was the beauty of darkness illuminated. The artist, in Friedrich Hölderlin’s words, rejoiced in flinging himself into the night of the unknown, as Hölderlin himself seemed to have done in having entered the insane asylum in Tübingen almost thirty years ago.
In the true artist, art and life were one, as in time past and as was their goal for time present, the poet and the priest were one, according to Novalis. This was at the center of their beliefs: the self, conscious, creative, munificent to the degree of profligacy, and most of all visible, tangible, inarguably unique, inarguably free, and, in those whose natures had become sufficiently refined, sublimely expressive.
At the end of the last century, a group of men, not unlike themselves, came to be known as Die Romantik, among them Novalis and Hölderlin and Eichendorff; Tieck and Wackenroder, the latter of whose death at the age of twenty-four kept the heart of the former shattered for the remaining fifty-five years of his life; and the younger of the Schlegel brothers, Friedrich,* who on the one hand carried forward the Johann Winckelmann tradition in extolling the “smooth, tight, marble-hard” male body and on the other quite betrayed that tradition by seducing Felix Mendelssohn’s Aunt Dorothea into leaving her Jewish husband and wrote a novel that described their sexual relations in the most intimate terms, including Dorothea’s desire to experience her passion in positions they had not known a woman could imagine, let alone assume. Had not Dorothea herself been so unutterably plain, she and her lover (later wife and husband, after she had “converted”) might well have epitomized Théophile Gautier’s romantic ideal of the beautiful, the free, and the young.**
It had been a glorious time, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, when the rights of man and the emancipation of the artist coalesced to produce what Joseph Eichendorff considered an inner regeneration of collective life.
Yet in how short a time did the profundities of self-expression lead to the superficialities of commercialism. What Schubert called “wretched, fashionable stuff” predominated. The great mystery facing mankind was not why all fashionable stuff was wretched but why so much wretched stuff was fashionable. Artistic standards were abandoned, the comfortable cult of the mediocre prevailed, and presentation became confused with substance.