Longing

by J. D. Landis

  “He came all this way to hear you play,” said Mendelssohn.

  “Splendid,” said Wieck. “I hope you won’t mind if we tell others of this honor,” he said to Chopin. “And may I assume we are your only stop in Leipzig?”

  “Hardly,” said Chopin. “First I picked up Mendelssohn and then we went to the Voigts.”

  “You stopped at the Voigts before—,” began her father, who seemed even more offended than he had been in Paris when Chopin had declined to receive the two of them in his home.

  Chopin seemed to know instinctively how to deal with her father’s anger, for he dared to interrupt him. “And considering the fact that we waited here more than an hour for your daughter, we should have gone to see someone else in the meantime. Besides, sir, what does it matter in what order one visits people? In Paris, the one seen last is the one seen longest.”

  “Then may I assume we are your last stop in Leipzig?”

  “If it is, sir, it will be because your daughter proves to be as talented as you are proving to be tedious. And in bad French, no less.”

  Chopin smiled and seemed to enjoy the sight of her father’s reddening face. At the point at which it looked as if it might explode, Chopin looked away toward Robert. “And who is this quiet boy over here?”

  Clara was worried Robert might find this condescending. Yet he was a boy. Though only two or three months older than Robert, Chopin seemed to bear the weight of both fame and experience; the world and his work had made him weary. Robert was robust with possibility and restlessness. Even his smile at Chopin’s notice of him was guileless.

  “This is Schumann,” said Mendelssohn, in a tone that indicated he had spoken of him to Chopin.

  Again, Chopin did not rise. Rather, he seemed to sink back farther into his chair. “Ah, yes. The one who so praised my Mozart variations that I was barely able to compose anything else for months, so intimidated was I by such undigested praise.”

  “Thank you,” said Robert. “It is such an honor—”

  “I am not sure you should thank me. I am not sure what I said was intended as a compliment. For your dithyramb struck me, I must say, as remarkably silly. Which is to say, you made of my rather straightforward variations some kind of phantasmagoric tableau. Don Juan does not gambol about with Leporello in my music. Nor does he kiss Zerlina at all, let alone on something so specific as a D-flat. And if you knew me better—which I hope you shall—you would know I have so little experience with women that I wouldn’t even know where to find a woman’s D-flat.”

  Robert laughed. “Well, if you need any advice in that regard—I mean where to find the D-flat on a woman, though I strongly recommend you begin with her A-natural—I’m your man.” He chuckled again.

  Chopin could not resist a smile at encountering this appreciation of his little joke. It was not a broad smile—his face was too contained for that—but it fully brightened his eyes above the hammocks of darkness on which they languidly rested.*

  “I do not tell stories in my music, Monsieur Schumann,” he said with far less exasperation, almost with a kind confessional friendship. “My music relates to nothing but itself. And whatever drama it contains, it is the drama of the next notes first and of all the notes together finally. It is the drama of harmony, in which the villain is dissonance and the hero is most often the same. I don’t read books. I certainly don’t read magazines. And the only theater I enjoy is the opera, which I attend solely for the music. To hear Pasta in Otello or Malibran in the Barber or Cinti-Damoreau in my poor Bellini’s Beatrice is to experience not drama but song. It just happens that I find my own voice in the piano. When I sing—and all I do is sing—it comes out of that wooden box. I only hope I’ll still be able to sing when I’m in a wooden box.”

  “So you too think of death?” said Robert.

  “How nice to find we have something in common,” answered Chopin.

  They adjourned to the studio with the largest windows, to let in the light from the street. Clara performed two of Chopin’s études and the last movement of his concerto. Chopin, his eyes lowered, sat motionless while she played and even at the end of each étude, so that the others, taking their cue from him, did the same. Robert, even more than he wanted to applaud the brilliance of her playing, wanted to reach out and grasp Chopin by the charmeuse lapels of his beautiful black dress coat and shake him so he might acknowledge the joy he must be feeling, to have someone this young and this beautiful display such love for his music and such mastery of it.

  But Robert didn’t move from his chair. And Chopin didn’t move within his own. He sat as still as someone listening for a rumor of wind on a listless sea.

  Finally, when Clara had finished the concerto and dropped her hands to the tops of her thighs and slowly stood up from the bench and walked toward an empty chair, Chopin said in what was almost a whisper, “No.”

  “No?” said Wieck, much more loudly and with the disbelief of someone for whom any negative expression involving his child’s art was intolerable.

  “No,” said Chopin, now accompanying the word with a slight shaking of his head. “And I am addressing not you, Monsieur Wieck, but your daughter.” He looked directly at Clara for the first time. “So if I may impose myself, because after all it is my music you have played: No, you must not leave the piano; no, you must not stop playing; no, I have never heard my work played more beautifully.”

  “Aha!” exclaimed Wieck, whom Robert, thrilled as he was himself with Chopin’s words, was prepared to throttle should he now demand of Chopin a written endorsement.

  Clara walked not back to the piano but directly toward Chopin, who rose now as he had not when she had first approached him in the drawing room. “I merely serve the beauty in the music,” she said. “If all études were as precious as yours, there would not be a person in the world who did not play the piano. Thank goodness, therefore, yours are unlike any others. But as for whether I will play more of your music, it is I who must say no. I do not yet have it under my fingers. But I do have him.”

  She turned from Chopin to face Robert, gave him a smile that struck him as complicitous, and immediately marched back to the piano.

  “Here are some pieces from his Carnaval,” she said, “which I am learning even as he writes them.”

  “So he is under your fingers, and I am not?” said Chopin.

  “Not entirely,” she said with a smile. “But he knows me well enough to forgive my mistakes. And I know him well enough not to fear his judgment.”

  Among the pieces of Carnaval she played was a brief nocturne that Robert called “Chopin,” and if Chopin realized he was being both mimicked and honored, he gave no sign. He was as still listening to Robert’s work as he had been listening to his own.

  When she finished, she had no hesitation in turning to Chopin to ask, “Well, what do you think?”

  “Incredible,” he said. He turned to Robert. “Out of this world.”

  “Play for Frédéric the sonata you played at your birthday,” said Mendelssohn. To Chopin he said, “It succeeds marvelously despite the sad burden it carries of having been written in, if my ear does not deceive me, F-sharp minor.”

  “You have a fine ear,” said Robert congenially. He never minded when people criticized his keys. An insult to the ear was the best way to open it. Beauty must inflame as well as comfort; art must challenge before it consoles.

  “Your birthday?” Chopin addressed Clara. “How old were you?”

  “I am sixteen,” answered Clara as she lowered her fingers upon the piece that had been written for her.

  As Robert listened to her play his music, he could not, for the first time, remember having composed it. She had obviously practiced it since her birthday and made it enough part of herself that she had taken it from him. All the suffering was gone from it, all the puzzlement and insecurity of form, the endless moments when no music or the wrong music had come to him, the bitterness of the coffee and the dryness of the smoke, the confusion at
feeling at one moment he was a genius and the next a bungler, the terrible false joy over whole pages that one day made him swell with pride and the next day he could not bear, the passion he’d felt for her when he’d been writing it and the dread that it was beneath her and thus that he was too. Now, as she played, he embraced himself with a contentment he hadn’t known before.

  Clara was quite exhausted when she finished, not least from the demands of the accented chords in the finale, and felt no need to ask Chopin’s opinion of the piece. He seemed preoccupied now or perhaps simply bored by her playing when, after all, it was he who was perhaps the greatest pianist in the world. It could not be easy to sit for so long and listen to someone else. She could remember those days when she appeared in public with other young pianists and, whether she had performed before them or had yet to perform, felt so strong a desire to play that she often had had to fight a perverse temptation to dash onto the stage and throw the other girl or boy from the bench.

  “Now you,” she said to him. “Please play one of your pieces for us.”

  “I cannot.”

  “Are you ill?” asked Clara.

  “I might as well be,” he said. “I am in love.”

  He had been ill, he explained, in the winter, with the influenza that had sent half of Paris to bed and the other half out of town. Because of the weakness of his lungs, he had contracted bronchitis, which caused him to cough so much that his hands would play chords when they had been poised for chromatic runs. But it was only when he began to spew blood from his mouth onto the keyboard that various of his doctors ordered him to leave Paris and go to the spa outside the city at Enghien, to which he went accompanied by Vincenzo Bellini, his great new friend who stayed with him off and on until Chopin left the baths of Enghien for those in Germany, Karlsbad specifically. Bellini died within a month of their separation, a mere ten days ago. Chopin received the news on his way back to Paris, in Dresden, where the mail coach had let him out and who should be standing there but a man named Wodzinski who had lived with his family in the Chopin boarding house in Warsaw and with whose eldest daughter, Maria, Chopin had played, games at the piano or hide-and-seek in the vast Pszenny mansion; though he was nine years older than she, which made her now exactly your age, he said to Clara, sixteen, and, as he discovered when he met her in Dresden for the first time since she was eleven, very beautiful and also a fine pianist, if not of course the equal of her. To make a long story short, and because he was running out of breath, he had, God help him, lost his heart to her, Maria Wodzinska, whom he had last seen upon his departure from Dresden for Leipzig only yesterday, a separation that seemed an eternity and had rendered him much too weak to play the piano for them now.

  “You didn’t tell me you’re in love,” said Mendelssohn, with amused pretense at being wounded.

  “Are you going to become her teacher?” asked Wieck suspiciously.

  “You must marry her,” said Clara, who felt that his sharing of this story was an even greater gift than his playing the piano for them. He and Robert were the same age, and she and Maria Wodzinska were the same age. It was too great a coincidence to be a coincidence.

  “You think so?” he asked her.

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Do you think she’d have me?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  He rose from his chair and for the first time stepped away from it, approaching Clara where she sat on the piano bench.

  “This is too high for me,” he said. “Might you have a stool?”

  “Oh, yes!” She went to a corner of the room and brought back an adjustable stool, which Chopin screwed down; when he sat his elbows were level with the white keys.

  He stretched out both arms, so that they reached the extremities of the keyboard with a minimum of movement. “As a man I wish to be taller, but as a pianist I do not. Most women are the perfect height for this instrument, like you, Mademoiselle Wieck. It is meant to be embraced but never ravished. Liszt virtually mounts the thing, the keyboard disappears beneath him. Who knows what his hands are doing? For me, each finger is a separate being. Like the children I shall never have. From their voices alone, they can be recognized.”

  He drew his hands back in toward his body, relaxed his shoulders, and took a deep breath. He seemed about to play when he turned his head slightly and said, “Forgive the simplicity of this piece. My travels and my illness and my passion have combined to make me tired. It’s a nocturne in E-flat. It is dedicated to the erstwhile wife of my dealer, Monsieur Pleyel. At the time I made the dedication, perhaps six years ago, she was Marie Moke. Now she calls herself Camilla Pleyel, but not for long. He is divorcing her, poor man.”

  Clara recalled meeting Monsieur Pleyel in his salon in Paris, and her fear of his young wife, as much for her beauty as for her reputation as a pianist. Now her fears had turned merely to curiosity.

  “Why?” she asked.

  Chopin misunderstood her question. “My dedication was not out of love. It is another Marie I was destined to love.”

  “Why is he divorcing her?” she clarified.

  “Wantonness.” With the word still on his lips, Chopin began to play, as if music might becloud the perfidy of woman.*

  Robert was entranced, finally to be hearing this pianist whose work and reputation he had championed. He didn’t care whether Chopin appreciated his efforts. What Robert wrote, whether it was words or music, seemed more often misunderstood than embraced. Art was the expression of the self, and its purpose was hardly to make that self appear lovable or even admirable. To make art was to explode within the world; it mattered not if people covered up their ears.

  Yet how much easier it is to love someone else’s work. He did not mind taking pleasure from Chopin; only being told he must give it himself. He leaned forward to watch Chopin’s hands. They were delicate and narrow and yet seemed able to embrace the piano not through breadth but by movement, flying lightly over keys he seemed barely to touch, fingering with a kind of perverse logic found precisely in the hand and not in the mind, thumbs on black keys, longer fingers passing over shorter. Chopin gave the impression he was improvising. It was this very illusion of impermanence that provided the music its eternal sway. It flew out of his hands into oblivion.

  When Chopin had completed the piece, looking more tired than the playing of so brief a composition would warrant, Clara said, keeping to herself the echo of these words unsaid in their first meeting in Paris, “You were wonderful, Monsieur Chopin.”

  “Thank you.” He stood and turned back toward his chair. There, pressed against the windows behind it, were faces.

  “I told you we would not be able to keep your presence in Leipzig a secret,” said Mendelssohn.

  “Make them go away,” said Chopin.

  Robert got up and walked past Chopin toward the windows. “They all look in such ecstasy,” he said. “When my playing is overheard, I find people at my windows with their tongues stuck out at me.”

  “You do not!” said Clara.

  “In that case, do you suppose it’s only my own reflection I see?” He was reminded of what he had written on the very first page of his very first review, of Chopin’s Mozart Variations—that he had listened, like these people, pressed against his own self in the embrasure of a window.

  Robert closed the curtains, but not before waving at all the people. Only then did Chopin venture farther toward his chair. “I cannot bear it,” he said, as if he were addressing his now invisible admirers in the street. “The public frightens me. They hold their breath when I’m about to play, and it’s I who am suffocated. They sit motionless and stare at me, and it’s I who am paralyzed. They are silent before me, and it is I who am rendered mute. I decided even before I left Paris that I would play no more concerts for strangers. Never. I dream of playing only for myself. I dream impossibly of sound being being captured the way Monsieur Niepce has captured an image of light.* Imagine, sound painted on something other than air. It will never happen, of course. It
is imaginable but inconceivable, no? We are fated, we musicians, to be the only artists whose work dies when we do. It is one thing to write music—far too much of that is left behind. But our sound is gone forever. And what is a man but his sound? It is the print of our soul upon eternity. It is the essence of our being. And it ends up, God help us, as silent as the very voices of the dead themselves.”

  Only now did Chopin turn to face his companions. He did not sit down. “Forgive my morbidity. And also if I take my leave. Do you suppose those people will be gone?”

  “You cannot be serious,” said Wieck.

  “I can assure you, sir, I have spent more time with you than I have or shall with anyone else in Leipzig.”

  “No, no, no,” said Wieck. “You misunderstand. I am satisfied with your visit. I am appreciative of your patience in allowing yourself the good fortune of hearing my daughter play. I meant only to say that I find it difficult to believe that you yourself will never again play for the public. How can this be true? Imagine if Thalberg said this. Or Liszt. To give up the adulation, the profit, the—”

  “I told Liszt of my plans. This is not idle talk on my part, Monsieur Wieck. Liszt, of course, was as skeptical as you, at least until I told him I meant to prescribe a course of action—or inaction, as it were—for myself alone, not for him or for any other pianist. What I cannot tolerate, I told him, you, Franz, are destined to do, for even when you fail to captivate your audience, you still have the power to stun it.* I, on the other hand, depend upon more subtle effects. And subtlety is, when one deals with the public, the equivalent of insult. And now, I trust I shall insult none of you if I say, good day.”

  Chopin turned to Robert. “I wonder if you would mind seeing me out?”

  “But this is my house,” said Wieck.

  “He’s bigger than you.”

  Robert felt Chopin take his arm and did not understand what Chopin had meant until they were at the front door and Chopin said to him, “Please be so kind as to peek out to see if any of those people remain. And if they do, beat them thoroughly until they leave me in peace.”