by J. D. Landis
A calling card thrown through her window was threatening only in that it was now known beside which window she sat in her banishment. When she turned the card over, however, and read the name upon it, she almost leapt from her seat. She pushed the window open even wider, leaned out, and saw there, on the street below, a man looking up at her with a face so beautiful she did not know what to do with her eyes and so just stared at him.
“I kiss your hand, gracious miss.” He employed the traditional Austrian greeting.
Though she was seeing him for the first time, she had seen innumerable renderings of him and would have recognized him on sight; there was, she thought, perhaps no man on earth for whom a calling card would be as superfluous. Even at this distance from her window to the street, viewing him slightly from above, what he most resembled for her still was Franz Joseph Gall’s famous casting of his head, some fifteen years ago. His hair remained as long, his green eyes as big (and his nose even larger, from what she could see), and the bones of his face as startling in their aggressive symmetry. He was now twenty-seven; she was eighteen. He was exactly a third older than she, both their ages divisible by nine, by three. It was a kind of symmetry of time. He had come upon her at the moment when they were most in harmony, balanced not only on the scale of time but dangling similarly, now that she had conquered Vienna, over the gaping, devouring mouths of the public.
They looked at one another for a moment more before both, in the same instant, pointed in the direction of the front door. Together, they disappeared from one another’s view for the time it took for them walk to the door and her to open it.
He was wearing—with his long, unbelted redingote, black suit, and flowing white shirt—peculiarly green gloves, both of which he removed before he reached for her right hand with his and clasped it gently. Upon his index finger he wore a gold-grounded ring, within which lay, in silver, a death’s head. So sure was Clara that Liszt would do as he had promised and kiss her hand that she found herself pushing against the pressure of his own. In the moment before embarrassment would have overtaken her, he yielded to the pressure and to her desire and put his lips to the back of her hand.
As he then motioned with his eyes for them to leave the doorway and proceed into the house, he said softly, almost conspiratorially, his hand grazing the back of her sleeve to guide her, “Forgive my unorthodox means of announcing my presence. As you know, I was urged by Chopin to track you down. As you don’t know, I was told by Chopin to avoid the man I believe is your father, at least until you and I have had a chance to size one another up, as it were, and to discuss the subject I believe is the cause of your father’s incivility. Is there a place we might sit and talk where, when we are discovered, as inevitably we shall be, your reputation will not be ruined by your proximity in private to the likes of me?”
She couldn’t tell if he was boasting of or apologizing for his reputation that accounted him a seducer and those he seduced the most fortunate women on earth. Neither could she think of anywhere to go but back to her own room, into which she led him, all the way to the window through which they had met, as if her showing it to him were the excuse she needed to bring him to what was in fact the most private place for her in all this rather large rented house.
He looked out the window into the street, pretending, she realized, to get his bearings. “Did you know that Sonnenfelsgasse used to be called Johann Sebastian Bachgasse? Note, I say ‘used to be.’ Sonnenfels was a rabbi, of all things, who worked for Empress Maria Theresa. No one in history, I suspect, has hated Jews as much as Maria Theresa. She borrowed their money to build the little summer place she wanted, Schönbrunn. But when she met with them to negotiate for the loan, she so feared contamination from the odium that had adhered to them ever since they had murdered her Lord that she sat behind a screen and put her hands over her ears much as you did over your eyes.* Not, I trust, because you find me odious.”
Clara shook her head.
“Thank goodness for that!” Liszt started to walk around the room, gazing at her possessions in a way that provoked in her no more discomfort than she was already feeling. “In any case,” he went on, “whether she could bear the sight of him or not, she listened to Rabbi Sonnenfels. He convinced her to stop torturing political prisoners. These included anyone who might upset the public order—thieves, spitters, liars, dissidents, blasphemers, freethinkers, French. He was a good man. Not good enough to displace Sebastian Bach’s name on a street sign, perhaps… Chopin was so outraged by that he has sworn never to come to Vienna, though I suspect that may have more to do with the presence of Thalberg in the very flesh than with the absence of Bach on a street sign. But the good rabbi, through no fault of his own, managed to get Bach’s name removed forever from the streets of Vienna and, such is the cruel congruity of imperial happenstance, what else but a piece of music dedicated to him.”
Like an actor hitting his marks, Liszt was at her piano at exactly the moment he might take his cue from himself and begin to play. He moved about twenty measures into the piece, when the opening arpeggio burst, as it had from the beginning been threatening to do, into the beginning of the tempest that gave the piece its nickname. At that point he simply stopped. None of the flourishes for which he was famous. No tossing of his hair, flinging of his arms, jangling of medals, not even, alas, one of his no doubt hundreds of lace-trimmed handkerchiefs thrown to the floor that she might later retrieve, since he always, it was said, left behind talismans for the ladies, be they such handkerchiefs chastely inseminated with his cologne or what was left of one of his cigars, moist with spittle from his lips and tongue.
“Beethoven,” she said.
“Actually, my name is Liszt. Franz Liszt.” He laughed at his little joke. “Or, more accurately, Ferenc Liszt, for as such was I born not thirty miles from here, on the Hungarian side of the border, thank Heaven, except for the Ferenc, naturally. I sometimes think had I been named a manly Friedrich, like a million other men, I might never have left Hungary in the first place. And, yes, that was Beethoven, but the D Minor of course, which I prefer to Rabbi Sonnenfels’ D Major. And, yes, that was the first and thus far the only word you have spoken to me: ‘Beethoven.’ A reference, perhaps, to what I understand was your absolutely revolutionary introduction of these fusty old Viennese to the Appassionata?”
“And it was still too much for them!”
She had amused him, and she was glad, and while she watched him take pleasure in her sarcastic little gibe at the expense of the conservative Viennese musical establishment, she realized he’d been right, she’d not said a word until she’d said, ‘Beethoven.’ That was not like her any longer. Since the day she had met Robert for the first time at the Caruses’, when she had not spoken in his presence, she had learned to talk until sometimes she chattered on and could hardly be shut up, while Robert had traveled in the opposite direction, from a kind of boisterous enthusiasm over everything into silences she knew struck others as brooding but were, she understood, almost literally part of his music. And when she played his music, so full of sound, almost unendingly gorged with feeling, containing, like a broken heart, so few rests, she felt she could hear behind the music those silences that had been necessary to its creation, emotional counterpoints to the passions in his sound and as necessary to an understanding of his work as were the very notes that fell from her fingers.
“He told me to give you a smile,” she said.
“Beethoven?” Liszt was very good at seeming serious while joking or teasing. He neither smirked nor smiled but looked into her eyes as if it were actually possible she had communed with Beethoven, or at least with his spirit, and that Beethoven might have told her to look at him warmly.
“My Robert,” she said, employing the possessive not, she realized, to indicate that he was hers but that she was his and that if Liszt wanted her heart, or a piece of it, he would have to fight for it. I am taken, she thought, and therefore must be taken to be had.
“And did
he indicate whether it is to be a smile merely transferred from him to me through you, or truly your own?”
Never before, in all the men who had approached her, in the past for her piano playing and now for her fame, and attempted to seduce her with as much allure as they could gather into stance and speech and silly grin or melancholy cockatrice, had she encountered such a master of flirtation as this. She felt his charm light up her face.
“Oh, that looks like one of your own,” he said, causing it to become wholly that.
“Whether it is or not,” she replied, hearing her amusement in the lilt of her voice, “Robert was more grateful for your review than you might ever realize. Until you wrote about him as you did, he was, when written about at all, and when spoken about always, maligned.”
Liszt’s review of two of Robert’s sonatas and of his impromptus based on a little theme of her own had appeared in Paris in the Gazette Musicale about a month after Clara had left on her tour. Robert had sent it to her, and she felt upon reading it that Liszt had understood as much about Robert as he did about his music, which is to say that each was an expression of the other and therefore the art as difficult and profound as the man, and the man as the art. So had Liszt, who had never before encountered anything by Robert or even heard his name, directed his music toward those of contemplative mind, those who could not be satisfied by the superficial work that was taken as art by the vast majority. Schumann’s ideas, he said, must be penetrated to be understood, dug into deeply for the life they held that like all transcendent aspects of life escape one’s initial experience of them. Only Chopin, Liszt had written, matched Robert for the individuality and depth of his music. Thus was Liszt’s review very like Robert’s own about Chopin in New Journal of Music, when Robert had announced to the world that a new and unknown genius had arrived and suggested hats be taken off to welcome him. Liszt was not as dramatic a writer as Robert, and so his piece had not caused the same stir, except in Robert, who had asked her to give Liszt one of her sweetest smiles. So she had.
*Maria Theresa’s hatred of Jews had, like execration of any group, been inherited, through not the silence of the blood but the ignorant prattle of what passes in family and school alike for the teaching of history. As is well known, the teaching of history is to history as the troth of a seducer is to love—fraudulent self-interest in the service of darkness. Jews had been forced to live in their own section of Vienna in the thirteenth century and a hundred years later (in observance of the seemingly eternal Viennese rubric Die Juden sind an allem schuld—the Jews are to blame for everything) were blamed for the rising of the Danube, an earthquake, and, despite their ghettoization, for the plague. Such spurious culpability survived for a hundred years (in other words, beyond the lives of all who first invented it), indeed was amplified by the passage of generations as parents said, in essence, to their children, “We want you to have the privilege of hatred to a degree that was denied to us.” Thus, in 1421, those Jews not burned at the stake were told to leave Vienna, and those Jews who did not leave Vienna were burned at the stake. Only some rabbis escaped either fate: In the ghetto synagogue that had been built with its back to the rest of Vienna because no Jewish house of worship was allowed to face the street, these rabbis, to avoid the humiliation of forced exodus or the special, horripilating pain of the flames, slit their throats with butcher knives (kosher, of course). When the Jews were allowed back into Vienna a bit more than a century later (were begged, in fact, to return, because the German banks had failed and you-know-who were the only ones who could rescue the economy), the warmth of their welcome was goosefleshed by a strange sartorial requirement: all Jews must wear, sewn prominently upon outer garments, a yellow globe of cloth, yellow being the most visible color from a distance, particularly when worn against black.
Leipzig
JUNE 8, 1838
I am no longer a moonlight knight.
Robert Schumann
As Clara had ordered, Robert stood in the shadows at exactly nine o’clock in the morning staring at her window. He had been there, as she had not ordered, for at least an hour before that. It made no difference to him what time it was. He had once again been unable to sleep and had spent the night thinking himself more and more deeply into her, her soul, her sleep, her dreams, until he cried out into the darkness, “Clara, I am calling for you!” and waited in the silence until he heard her voice loudly and distinctly, from next to him on his bed, “Robert, I am with you.” He reached for her, knowing she was not there. A kind of dread came over him, as he realized how spirits can communicate over great distance and yet never carry with them the small comforts of materialization. He had called for her almost every night and had thought that the nights on which she did not call back were the worse. But so unstrung had he felt himself by the clarity of her voice and the absence of her flesh that he had decided never to call for her again. Such determination, however, had not kept him from standing outside her window calling to her silently.
Having seen nothing but the glass of the window growing opaque in the rising sun, he was surprised, at exactly nine o’clock, to see the signal she had hoped to send, the movement of a small white towel. He looked for her hand upon it, or at least its shape within it, knuckles, fingers, a ring he had given her. But all he could see was the towel, waved, he thought, with a lassitude that did not match his excitement at learning that her stepmother had spent the night with her own mother, Frau Fechner. Clara, who had been ordered to fetch Clementine home, therefore had an excuse to leave the house and could meet him. It was for him such intrigue as is as appealing in a book as it is tedious and demeaning in life.
As she had further ordered, he immediately left his post and walked to the market square, slowly, almost dragging his feet, listening for her footsteps behind him, hoping to be surprised by her, a whisper in his ear, perhaps even a hand thrust between his bicep and his ribs if she dared touch him in public in daylight. But as keenly as he listened for her, and told himself he would judge the depth of her love according to how quickly she came to him, he was taken wholly by surprise when he felt his arms pinned to his sides from behind and her lips against his neck and heard her breathless giggle in his ear.
“Robert, Robert, Robert. Happy birthday, Robert! Here is your gift.”
She swung him around, or herself around upon him, so they were face to face, held together by her arms until he put his own around her, though he was unable to bring himself to hold her with as much strength as she held him. Even when they met at night, huddling in doorway darkness for a few minutes, he could not believe they might not be discovered, no matter whether Nanny was along to stand guard. He was not afraid her father would shoot him, but he had never been afraid of that; dead, he was of no use to the suffering the world seemed to need in order to fill its quota of disillusion. He was afraid that if they were discovered together, they would be torn apart forever. To have her, he often felt, he must forsake her. To possess her, displace her. To touch her, touch her never again.
Now she took his arm and pulled him along, not toward Frau Fechner’s house but in the opposite direction.
“Where are we going?” He tried to interrupt the flow of her words, which had continued from the moment she had taken her lips from his.
“To Vienna.” She laughed. “Papa has now written down his consent. That is what I have been dying to tell you. He says he will never let us live together in Leipzig, where we would forever remind him of what he calls our treachery. ‘What is our treachery, Papa?’ I ask him. Oh, how angry that makes him. I think it refers to our sin, Robert? Do you?” She squeezed his hand and pressed her arm against his. “He suggests you go on ahead to Vienna and make arrangements to move the magazine there and then, perhaps, to sell it. That way, he says, you may begin to have enough money for us to live. He claims I need two thousand thalers a year to spend. Or at least that’s what he seems to take from me. But I can earn hardly three pfennigs from my art in Leipzig. Yet in Vienna I am qui
te the darling. The public loves me, the court adores me, and the aristocracy treats me precisely like what Liszt calls a conjurer or a clever dog, which he despises for himself but I quite like, so long as they pay me. For a single concert during the winter season in Vienna I can make a thousand thalers. They charge an absolute fortune there! If I didn’t know how to play the piano, I wouldn’t be able to afford to hear myself. Not that I’d want to, if I didn’t know how to play. But still. I can get more there for my music than for my body. Alas. And if I give a single lesson a day, I can make another thousand each year. And you a thousand also. So there! We’re almost rich in Vienna, and we haven’t even moved there. What do you think, Robert? Please say you’ll go.”