by J. D. Landis
For one more week he remained in Vienna to finish up this piece, which he called “Corpse Fantasy” and through the writing of which he felt he was serving his brother more faithfully and honestly than had he stopped composing and gone to see him. When the piece was finally done, Robert could delay no longer and with great anxiety boarded the coach for Zwickau. In the middle of his first night’s travel, he was awakened by the playing of trombones, a sad chorale that made him shiver and attempt to draw the darkness of the night around him for what little heat inhabited such blank invisibility. But the cold, bright moon escaped a cloud and wrapped its light around the trombones’ lamentations.
“Do you hear that?” he whispered into the groans of music unnerving the coach.
“I hear nothing,” said the man seated beside him. He looked at his watch in the moonlight.
“What time is it?” asked Robert.
“Three twenty-eight.”
As he learned five days later, when he arrived in Zwickau too late for his brother’s funeral, it was at precisely that same minute on the morning of April 6 that his brother had died. He was not at all surprised by this coincidence. Whether the music had originated in the air or in his head, or from some outpost in the heavens where trombones never ceased their crying out to those on Earth about to lose a loved one, he knew that music always played when someone died. It was, like death itself, the ultimate expression of life.
*The origin of which has long been a subject of political debate in Vienna: Was it created by Franz Sacher, Metternich’s chef, as some sort of apparent pastriological homage to repression but in fact the very emblem (because of its sponginess) of Austrian resilience, or was it concocted as a taunt to the sweet-toothed Emperor Franz Joseph by Anna Sacher, who offended morality by smoking cigars and pimping for the girls in the Vienna Opera Ballet? If it was the latter, then what Robert was served was, by chronological necessity, an anticipatory imposter and an emblem, therefore, of Count Sedlnitzky’s innocent child in whom might one day rise the dough of jacquerie.
**In Grillparzer’s words, Clara “sinks her white fingers in the flood … her quickened heart beats fast … -she leads them with white fingers as she plays.” Schumann had another reason to identify with this great Austrian writer: Grillparzer had been engaged to Katherina Frölich for fifteen years! Indeed, Grillparzer remained betrothed to his “eternal bride” for another thirty-five years, at which time he broke off the engagement. Only then did he feel comfortable asking Katherina to live with him, which she and one of her equally ancient sisters did on Singerstrasse, not many doors from where they had grown up and close, too, to the old home of Beethoven’s teacher Johann Albrechtsberger.
*While Robert was in Vienna, Grillparzer announced he would publish no more plays in his lifetime. Thirty-four years later, when he died, three of his greatest works were found among his papers.
*While it was Schubert’s deathbed wish to be buried next to Beethoven, the closest available plot was four graves distant. It was for this reason that when Schumann lay down between the graves, he hovered above the remains of Baron von Wssehrd. Twenty-four years later, both Schubert and Beethoven were exhumed so their skulls might be measured in yet another futile, belated attempt by scientists to try to explain, and thus explain away, genius. But when they were reinterred, they were still the same four graves apart! Only in 1888 were they once again dug up, this time to be taken to Vienna’s Central Cemetery, where indeed they now rest so close that they can, almost as one, share the terrible silence. And what used to be the Währing Cemetery is now, absent both Schubert and his knowledge of the honor, Schubert Park.
**So it was that he made his way to the Wieden suburb and knocked on the Kettenbrüchengasse door of Schubert’s brother Ferdinand, who ended up showing Schumann hundreds of pages of unpublished music by Franz Schubert—whole operas and parts of operas, four huge masses, several symphonies, songs, piano pieces for two hands, four hands, dozens of unfinished chamber works. Before he left Vienna, Schumann was able to present to Ferdinand an offer of 180 florins from Breitkopf and Härtel for publication rights to the C-Major Symphony, not to mention five gratis copies.
Altenburg
AUGUST 18, 1839
I would like to compare music to love. If
it is too lovely and intimate, it hurts.
Clara Wieck
“I don’t remember this city at all.” She stood naked at the window of his hotel room, its curtains held between her forearms so that only her head might be visible to someone looking up out of the darkness of the street. She could feel Robert’s eyes on her back, moving as his hands would soon, fingers in the ditch of spine, palms’ heels hard against the fan of flesh. As much as she had longed for this moment in the year since she had seen him, and in the months before that when she had last lain with him, the most she could do now was let him look at her across the distance of the room. How strange that what had been frightfully desired, and pictured almost too often in the mind, could become so abstract when finally made real. The passage of time reduced one’s lover to a shadow, or a dream; and his advent—his appearance before her with his thick hair and blue eyes and strong fingers and back and his longing manifest—was more than she could bear. She was afraid to touch him. She was afraid he would disappear, or she.
“Why should you remember it?” His breath followed the words, almost in a slow whistle, not the kind he sometimes made when he composed but the long, slow, satisfied exhalation that accompanied his successful lighting of a cigar. She waited until the smoke should reach her, and then she took a deep breath. It was surely one of the most wonderful fragrances put on Earth, released by heat.
“It was in Altenburg that my mother gave me back to my father. When I was five. I’ve told you that story.”
“But only a hundred times. How can you expect me to remember?”
“Robert!” Finally, he’d made her laugh. She nearly turned around.
“I thought it was your father who took you from your mother. Besides, you must have been through Altenburg a dozen times by coach.”
“Yes, but I never thought I’d end up here in a hotel room with you. I never thought I’d actually stop here. I never thought I’d…”
“You needn’t,” he said.
“I needn’t?”
“Just because two people are naked doesn’t mean they must…”
“It doesn’t?”
“Of course not.”
“Oh, but I must.”
“You must?”
“Yes, I really must.”
She released the curtains, paused for a moment in case there might actually be someone in the street who had been waiting to see her, and turned to face Robert.
“Please put that cigar down.”
Their meeting had been arranged in secret by Dr. Moritz Reuter, who had summoned Clara from Paris, where she had gone at the beginning of the year to play and teach and otherwise try to expand the influence of her name and achieve more income than outlay. Though she had traveled such distance without her father for the first time, he had been planning to join her and go on with her around Europe, to keep her from Robert once he had returned to Leipzig from Vienna and to keep her earning through her concerts and her teaching what she could not earn in Leipzig. But when her father learned that Robert was not going to be moving to Vienna permanently, he wrote to Clara that unless she gave up Robert completely, he would disown her, would require her to support her brothers, would hold all her earnings (over seven thousand thalers) for five years at four percent interest, would deduct from those earnings the room and board he had supplied her since the age of five as well as the cost of all the lessons he had ever given her, and would never give her another lesson for as long as she lived.
Strangely, she found, it was the final threat that most upset her. The money was phantasmal, perhaps because it had always seemed to flow directly from her fingers into his, which is to say, she would play the piano, and he would pocket the recei
pts. As for teaching, that was anything but an illusion. Her father had been her only teacher of the piano. In teaching her to play, he had, in essence, taught her to talk, taught her to listen, taught her to feel (not merely with capricious emotion but with the fingers themselves, with her very body, as both a source for, and a medium of, the music). So it was with her body that she reacted to his threat, yearning physically for the presence of her father beside her as she practiced in her hotel room on rue Michadière, where she had two grand pianos, each given her by its maker, Camille Pleyel and Pierre Erard.
She was expected to choose between them. She knew that her choice would bring esteem (and increased sales) to one man and disappointment, perhaps even offense, to the other. In fact, both pianos felt alien to her. Their touch was stiff and their sound thin, cold, elusive, which she suspected was her fault, not theirs. She had been brought up on her father’s German and Austrian instruments, supple, beguilingly generous, sometimes almost alive, always seductive in their sound and feel. These French pianos were like French men, arrogant and demanding, as aloof as they were pretty. Of the two, she preferred the Pleyel. But when she moved from the Hôtel Michadière to a larger apartment on rue Navarin, it was the Erard she took, even though she found its keys nearly immovable and wished constantly as she played upon it that her father were there to show her some new way of attack, to place his hands where her forearms met her wrists and press his fingers into her muscles as she played to train them how to redirect their strength.
But her father was at home, not only threatening her with disinheritance and then a lawsuit but also reported by the Mendelssohns to have taken up with Camilla Pleyel, of all people, though it was not really “of all people,” it was deliberate on his part to hurt her, his own daughter, by turning his musical attentions to her only female rival as a pianist. Maria Moke had taken the name Camilla after she married Camille Pleyel, a strange act of fidelity considering the fact that she had proven unfaithful in all else and had been divorced by her husband on grounds of adultery so persistent as to be undeviating. Liszt, it was said, had bedded her; Gérard de Nerval was believed to have met her in Austria and based his Pandora upon her. And now her father had championed Camilla in Leipzig, escorting her onto the stage, sitting beside her to turn her pages (for she seemed to have no more memory for music than for the vows of marriage), nodding with great approval all through her recitals, and smiling with the most exaggerated ecstasy when she had completed each piece. It was not fair, Clara knew, to punish Monsieur Pleyel for his ex-wife’s coquetry, but neither could she bear to sit at a piano with the name Pleyel emblazoned upon it.
So she had chosen the Erard. Upon it she taught her three students, whose payments were not sufficient to support her in a city as expensive as Paris, as neither were the sums she earned from her concerts. At these she played everything, it seemed, but Robert’s music, which she reserved for the occasional private soirée where she hoped at least some of the guests would be of sufficient sophistication to appreciate the challenge of his work, though after she had played some of his Carnaval at two in the morning at the home of Countess Perthuis, and the guests had looked quite puzzled when she had finished, she wrote to Robert begging him to send her some new work that would be easy to understand, not too long, not too short, without a confusing title, in short something that might be suitable for the general public, demeaning as it might be for a genius to have to fashion work that was as far beneath him and his abilities as it was accessible to the common ear. It was, she said, simply too painful for her to play his work for people who did not begin to understand it. And while he was at it, would he please change the title of the “Corpse Fantasy” simply to “Nocturne,” so that people would not be so bothered by the title that they would never be able to listen to the music. Well, he explained, it was true that each of the pieces in Carnaval cancels out the one before, and not everyone can adjust to such aesthetic purification; it is a cleansing, like that of death, that offends. And he had changed the title of the “Corpse Fantasy,” though in doing so he had warned her that they might be wide apart in their understanding of what it meant to be an artist and expressed his hope that this would not bring them bitter times in the future.
There was no bitterness now between them. They were alone in the world, it seemed, on the first floor of a hotel in Altenburg, and no one but Dr. Reuter knew they were there. He, who had once told Robert to take a wife, had sent them into one another’s arms as a way for them to gather strength for the battle before them.
Robert had petitioned the Appeals Court in Leipzig for permission to marry Clara Wieck without her father’s consent. Clara, in Paris—trembling as she took the pen from Monsieur Delapalm, her lawyer (that she should need a lawyer! for the purpose of suing her own father!)—had signed the petition. She and Robert had been summoned to appear, together with her father, in court.
How different, she wondered, was this from what marriage would be? To lie awake in the middle of the night in a small hotel room in a small city that would mean nothing to her—she could not imagine being booked to perform here—had it not been the site of her being given over, as she saw it, to music. Her father had recognized her. Not merely her gift, but her. It was as if, when she used to climb to her dead brother Adelheid’s room to listen to her mother play the piano, her father had been there with her, seeing in her the birth of her great secret, that music could pass through her body on its way from the living to the dead. He had chosen her because he knew her. He was her teacher. Like all great teachers, he was divine: not for his knowledge but for how he spread it through her, expanding it within her from enlightenment to expression. How could she not adore him, who adored her so much that he had lost himself within her? Perhaps he recognized her too well. It was too much to expect him to approve of this. That she was profligate in passion, wholly given over, when she gave herself, to such pleasure as was blinding, such feeling that, when she had mounted it and thrown herself off the very edge of life itself, she ceased feeling entirely and lay here waiting for the feeling to return.
“Robert,” she whispered.
He was asleep.
“My husband.”
Leipzig
DECEMBER 18, 1839
She is an immoral girl who has been seduced by a miserable wretch.
Friedrich Wieck
We, the undersigned, have for several years harbored a shared and genuine wish to be joined in marriage. But there has always been a hindrance to the fulfillment of our wish. Although it gives us deepest pain, we have no choice but to take measures against this hindrance. The father of Clara Wieck, the cosignatory, in defiance of our repeated and respectful requests, withholds his consent. We are unable to understand his reasons: we are conscious of no failings; we have sufficient means to support ourselves now and in the future. Therefore, Herr Wieck must hold a feeling of personal animosity toward the other signatory, who nonetheless believes that he has fulfilled every duty a man owes to the father of the woman he desires as his companion for the rest of his life. Consequently, we approach the High Court with a most humble request: that your worships will cause Herr Wieck to give his consent to our marriage or, if it better suits the court, that you will give your consent in place of his.
Robert Schumann
Clara Wieck
“I will never give my consent,” said Wieck. “Never!”
“Would you care to tell us why.”
Friedrich Wieck found the words of Archdeacon Rudolf Fischer, who presided over the court, confusing. He sat up there between his comagistrates, who said nothing but always nodded in perfect synchronism whenever Pastor Fischer said anything, when he so much as cleared his throat, and uttered such equivocal statements as “Would you care to tell us why.”
“Are you asking me if I would care to or are you asking me if I will?”
“As you wish,” said Pastor Fischer.
“I do not care to,” said Wieck.
“Then you needn’t,”
said Pastor Fischer.
“But I will.”
Now it was Pastor Fischer who was confused. He said so, with more impatience than Wieck felt was granted to himself to express in this court. “I am confused, Herr Wieck. Either tell the court why you will never give your consent to your daughter’s marriage or do not tell the court.”
“If the court agrees to rule in my favor, then I will not tell the court. I do not, as I said, care to tell the court, for by so doing I shall ruin the life of my daughter when my purpose is to save it.”
“Challenge,” said Wilhelm Einert, Clara and Schumann’s lawyer, who was so short in stature and shrill in voice that Wieck felt his very attendance in court gave himself, who was his own lawyer, a distinct advantage.
“The opposing attorney is required to stand when issuing a challenge,” said Wieck.
“I am standing.” Einert glanced down at himself and then, having verified this information, rose on tiptoe to further make his point.
“You are not in the ballet,” said Wieck.