by J. D. Landis
Without waiting for Ernestine’s reaction—either to this news of her change of circumstance or to the fact that neither of the men had directed it to Ernestine personally—Clara exclaimed, “Oh, goody!”
Dresden
JUNE 8, 1834
You were at the parting of the ways between childhood and girlhood.
Robert Schumann
Dear Herr Schumann,
Today, Sunday the 8th of June, on the day when the beneficent Lord sent from heaven the fire of your music, and you were born, I sit here all alone and write to you. (Though I need not: for this afternoon alone I had two invitations and was forced to tell my handsome inviters, “Sorry, but it is the birthday of a far fairer gentleman than you and I must write to him or I shall never forgive myself nor he forgive me either.” Is that not so? I mean, could you possibly forgive me if I did not write? Are you not at this very moment saying to yourself, “I am so happy that she wrote”?)
The first thing I must say is that I send you my following heartfelt wishes: that you won’t always be contrary; that you drink less Bavarian beer; that you not turn day into night and vice versa; that you write your music without fail; that you finish your articles for your magazine; and most of all that you promise to come to see me in Dresden.
It is as if Papa has sent me into exile, away from himself, away from yourself. I am daily studying composition with Herr Reissiger, who you will be pleased to know is almost as fond of my progress on “Ballet des Revenants” as you were with its humble beginnings. And I sing every other day (he stupidly instructs me not to sing or even to speak a single word on the days we don’t meet) for Herr Miksch (who studied with Caselli, who studied with Barnacchi, who studied with Pistocchi, who studied with Manelli, who studied with Folignato—in case you aren’t aware, a castrato!—who studied with Apollo for all I know). And I am perfecting my French with Monsieur Baragouin and my English with Mr. Edea, because Papa tells me that the more languages I know, the more money I shall make, as if my music could remain pure while my voice becomes covetous.
But I am lonely here. Do you think it is to be tolerated, Herr Schumann, that you take so little notice of your friend that you have not written to her even once? Every time the mail arrives, I hope to find a little letter from a certain Herr Devotee, but alas I am always disappointed. I comforted myself with the thought that at least you would visit me here, but I have just heard from Papa that you are not coming with him after all because Knorr is ill and you must therefore work even harder to keep the magazine on schedule. Before long you shall have six pages for it from me, and you will so admire them that you will have to pay me a lot. In the meantime, please send me your new Rondo so I may work on it and have at least a part of you within my hands. And might I not expect also a letter, both original and legible, Herr Schumann? This ingenious, original, and witty epistle commends to you with due deliberation (you who do not like haste) your friend
Clara Wieck
Clara Wieck
(Double)
p.s. There is a pretty girl here (though not as pretty as Ernestine, you will be happy to hear) named Sophie Kaskel who is quite in love with your Impromptus and practices them religiously.
Leipzig
JUNE 9, 1834
By all means play piano duets with Schumann,
but no more.
Baron Ignaz von Fricken
On the day after his twenty-fourth birthday, Robert went with Ludwig and Ernestine to the home of Henriette Voigt, who had, among his married friends, taken the place of Agnes Carus in his heart. But he did not long for Henriette, as he had longed for Agnes. He merely kept her within that compartment in his mind reserved exclusively for women whom he could not, after all, have. This lent her the kind of eternal desirability that never quite managed to adhere to those women he had had.
Henriette was married to Karl Voigt, one of the richest men in Leipzig, who appeared to spend all his money on art and on his wife, in the former of which he displayed as questionable taste as in the latter he demonstrated, simply for having chosen her to marry, the most discriminating. She was almost exactly Robert’s age and quite boisterously beautiful. She wore her hair loose in all its wild curliness, never needed to rouge her cheeks because merriment did it for her, laughed at everything and nothing, though never obstreperously, and spent her husband’s money on clothes that fit her so well they appeared both superfluous and indispensable.
What freedom Henriette sacrificed in her strict adherence to the vows of marriage she bestowed upon others in her passion for their coupling. It was not merely, or even primarily, the carnal sort she advocated, though she took no small delight in the tingle of the news of concupiscence incited. What she loved most in life was love itself, preferably between two people who, if not for her, would not experience their love for each other and thus would not have her as the avenue down which they walked on what she was convinced was the only road to earthly paradise. She could not meet someone, or at least someone unattached, without trying to think immediately of someone else to whom he or she might become attached. Leipzig was full of young couples who, if not for Henriette Voigt, would not know what she herself had found with Karl Voigt: comfort, tranquility, asylum.
And while she had not introduced Robert and Ernestine to one another, she was now offering her home to them as a safe haven, away from the unreasonable, unnatural restrictions of the Wieck household, where Ernestine lived and was guarded in her virtue by Friedrich Wieck himself, who had promised her father, the baron, that no kiss, no caress, would pass between his daughter and Schumann, though two things were clear to Henriette: Wieck had promised this only because he believed, particularly after the devastation of his divorce, that solely if planted in such virtue could the flower of lifelong love bloom; and Robert and Ernestine had at the very least both kissed and caressed, if indeed they had not yet surpassed such superficial knowledge of one another’s bodies with a true plumbing of the depths of love’s great congress.
Wieck knew as well as Henriette that there was something between Robert and Ernestine; he wanted to nurture it while at the same time he didn’t want it to become something that would render their wedding night anticlimactic or her father apoplectic. Wieck himself had told Henriette as much, and more, in telling her that immediately upon Ernestine’s arrival in his house in April he had arranged for Clara to be sent to Dresden to further her musical studies. This demonstrated to Henriette that Wieck was her formidable foe as a matchmaker. But it was precisely the privacy Wieck refused to allow Robert and Ernestine that Henriette was able to give them and thus to assure herself that their union would be achieved through her and not him, his inadvertent introduction of the two of them notwithstanding.
She had met Ernestine several times at the Wieck house and had found her beautiful if, at seventeen, not yet in possession of that beauty, which shone from her but did not illuminate her. Robert himself described her, like someone who’d rehearsed the words in order to convince himself of their truth, as a brilliant jewel with the face of a Madonna and a wondrously pure soul.
When Henriette invited Robert to come visit with Ernestine, he thanked her profusely for this opportunity to be alone with Ernestine, who was, as he put it, passionately attached to him. He explained he could not invite Ernestine to his own modest home because he lived with his best friend there, whom he begged Henriette’s permission to take along with him to her house as the friend was not well and was also passionately attached to Robert. Henriette had found this curious but agreed cheerfully because she was always on the lookout for new young men, even those who were delicate or perhaps ailing, given the fact that there seemed to be in Leipzig and she guessed in the world at large approximately a hundred attractive and intelligent young women for every similarly endowed young man, truly one of the great tragedies affecting the human race and an imbalance in nature so grievous as to argue for either the absence or the cruelty of God.
And so, when she opened her door herself (
never comfortable with her servants’ participation in her arranged trysts) to what she recognized as Robert’s curiously rhythmic yanking upon the ancient brass-and-marble bell pull for which Karl had paid some giddy sum, Henriette Voigt saw before her her sturdy Robert, his fetching inamorata, who greeted her with a smile so charmingly guiltless that Henriette wished for a moment something she had never wished before (that she were seventeen again), and a tall young man of strange beauty (he had the tranquil eyes of a religious in the bedazzling head of a serpent) who immediately said to her with a kind of ruined, distant voice, “This is difficult to believe.”
She had no idea what he meant, which made her laugh all the more mischievously. “That you are the chaperon?” she asked.
“That you are the chaperon,” he responded.
“Look what I have for your birthday,” Henriette said to Robert as she led the three of them into her home.
He looked first into her hands, then about the sitting room whose doors she opened.
“What?” he inquired.
“Any room of my house you desire—but for this one, where Herr Schunke and I shall sit and talk, and of course the servants’ quarters, where I fear Fräulein von Fricken might observe things she is not yet old enough to appreciate.”
Ernestine blushed. “You mistake my innocence, Frau Voigt.”
“For what?” asked Henriette.
“For its opposite.”
“And what might that be, Fräulein von Fricken?”
“Why, guilt, I suppose.”
“I should have thought you might say the opposite of innocence is experience.”
“Oh, I have so little experience.”
“Poor child, you have guilt without experience?”
Ernestine thought for a moment and then seemed to come to what seemed upon her face a very revelation. “I suppose I do.”
“Well, then,” said Henriette, “you will have either to earn your guilt or expand your experience.”
Again, Ernestine needed time to think before she said, “Do those not amount to the same thing?”
“Not in my house!” Henriette laughed merrily. “Never in my house.”
She poured sherry for all of them and toasted Robert’s birthday. “May you live forever and marry soon.”
Again, Ernestine blushed.
“Now, go and enjoy my birthday gift,” said Henriette.
Robert left the sitting room with two glasses of sherry and with Ernestine, who, as soon as Henriette had closed the doors behind them, said, “I cannot imagine why you aren’t in love with her instead of with me.”
“But she’s not available.” The moment Robert uttered these cruel words he wished he could take them back. He opened his mouth and screwed a cigar into it.
But Ernestine, bless her simple soul, simply said, “And I am available, I suppose?”
“I never meant to imply that,” he obfuscated with the truth.
“Well, I am,” she said. “And I shall remain so until we marry.”
“Available to whom?” He wondered if this is what a woman did: threaten to give herself to others so that the one to whom she really wanted to give herself would claim her.
“To you, of course.”
She grasped his arm and led him down a long hallway as if this were Verführungstrasse instead of the private home of a woman whose considerable charms Robert hoped would somehow miraculously inhabit this sweet young woman who had secretly agreed to be his wife, or whose husband he had secretly agreed to become, he couldn’t remember which.
On their way to wherever she was leading him, they passed through the gallery in which Karl Voigt had hung the majority of his most recent acquisitions. There was something new by Carl Blechen, who seemed to have abandoned waterfalls and gorges for a smoke-voiding factory farting poison at the river. The paintings by Peter Cornelius and Friedrich Overbeck put Robert in mind of the music of Otto Nicolai: a German attempting to become Italian succeeded no better than, as Robert remembered from his own youthful trip to Italy, a German attempting to mount an Italian. He spoke to Ernestine of the influence of Perugino, not to mention of the monks of Sant’Isidoro, whose celibacy was reflected in the passionlessness of the paintings and whose disapproval Robert compared to that of the two stern men looking at Ary Scheffer’s naked Francesco and Paolo. He was more fond of the tortured and clearly anti-Italian drawing by Géricault of the woman in Paris he had loved with utter hopelessness and of Géricault’s faces of madmen that represented his own only to the extent that they portrayed not his features but the repercussions in the mind of unrequited love. (Ernestine, however, seemed more interested in Robert’s recounting of Géricault’s death, precisely ten years ago, by being thrown from his horse while in exile in London.) And he could not help admiring Julius von Carolsfeld’s painting of the strangely haloed king of the elves offering the doomed little boy of Schubert’s “Erlkönig” his bountifully comely daughter, one of whose breasts was so perfectly and succulently round that Robert could barely refrain from testing it with his fingertip. But for every Géricault and Prud’hon pencil study of the Empress Josephine’s sumptuous, shadow-casting bosom, there was a ridiculously overblown von Kaulbach, which compelled Robert to proclaim that he could imagine no worse fate than to have to live in Düsseldorf, and a Sunday bandstand scene by Oscar Ohrenschmalz and a landscape by Alfred Schlimm and a still life by Josef Kürbis in which a gourd and two grapes were so composed that even Ernestine giggled. “A self-portrait, no doubt,” commented Robert, which caused Ernestine, unmindful of the sherry glasses still in his hands, to throw herself into his arms.
“Take me,” she said.
“Where?” he asked.
“To show me more funny paintings.”
They left the gallery and began to climb the wide, curving stairway, along the wall of which were hung at least a dozen of Heinrich Grundverschieden’s portraits of his mother, in each of which she was wearing a different hat and each hat bearing a different bird, looking out at the viewer as if he or she were a worm.
“Have you ever been up here?” asked Ernestine when they had reached the top of the stairs.
“Yes.”
She stopped and looked fiercely into his eyes. “When?”
“Never.”
“I might answer the same if you were to ask me if I have ever made love.”
“You have and you haven’t?” he inquired.
“I have only imagined it,” she answered.
Now he did love her. She was rich and a virgin and at least intelligent enough to tease him with his own words.
She opened the door to a small bedroom.
“This will do,” she said.
Robert looked around. There were no paintings on the walls—this in itself was cause for celebration—nothing but a single melancholy drawing by Moritz von Schwind of Schubert at the piano. Within the room, there were merely a bed and a chair and a relatively simple Jacobean oak chest of drawers on stile feet and a small, well-worn prayer rug with a particularly gentle mihrab, or arch, inspired by a mosque that was particularly welcoming to those pilgrims on life’s last journey.
She closed the door behind them and held out her hand. “Now I am ready for my drink.”
Robert looked down at the glasses in his hand. There was almost nothing left in either of them. “I seem to have spilled it all,” he said.
“I doubt it,” she said and took the cigar from his mouth and a glass from his hand and thrust her tongue all the way to its bottom until there was nothing left but an amber drop or two that rolled off her lips onto his.
The longer Henriette Voigt sat with Ludwig Schunke, the more time she wished she might have with him. She tried to distract herself with thoughts of Robert and his Ernestine, wherever they might be lost or hiding in her cavernous house, however they might be exploring each other’s considerable charms (his profound, hers generously superficial), but she seemed to have lost her former gift for, and pleasure in, the visualization of other
s in the act of love. This man before her was robbing her very soul. He was sitting at no small remove from her—she with her feet up on a French walnut duchesse brisée, he having sought the refuge of a far-less-comfortable George I walnut armchair with its narrow shepherd’s-crook arms, and between them a hideous giltwood banquette covered in red toile de Jouy over which Karl had wept in presenting it to her—but had entered her as surely as if…It was an amazing thing for a relationship to have been consummated thus. The flesh had not been bypassed. It had been foreclosed upon. She felt they belonged to one another as the sky did to the sea and the sea to the sky at that point beyond which vision failed and only faith was left to imagine the infinite.
He was dying, this man. He was wandering through the house of death and showing her the rooms, not to trap her there but simply to provide the pleasure of an afternoon in which eternity is measured in a gesture, a word, the serenity of silence.
She had not known anyone who was dying. That is to say, she had not known anyone who had known he was dying. She wondered what it was like to live with such knowledge. Did it make you want to hide yourself away or to dance with practically everybody? Did it make life precious or demean it? Did it inspire fear or courage?
It was not that she asked these questions of Herr Schunke—that would be impertinent and intrusive. But she did ask them of herself, even as she sat there watching and listening to a man who seemed, with his very dying, to bring life into her life.
He himself appeared nothing if not comfortable with the entire subject. He treated it as if he were planning someday soon, he wasn’t sure just when, to go off by train or carriage to yet another city, as he had, he told her, left Paris for Vienna, Vienna for Prague, Prague for Dresden, Dresden for Leipzig.
“But this will be your final journey,” she said, not insensitively, she trusted.
“Let us hope so,” he replied, laughing.