by J. D. Landis
As Einert, with tiny, soundless steps, went to Pastor Fischer and, bowing, handed him the two letters, Wieck gathered up the many pages of his declaration much as a man would fallen leaves when he had no garden implements, stuffing the papers into his arms, compressing them within his hands, squeezing them between his fingers, from which their edges and corners nonetheless extended into the courtroom with accusatory perceivability. When, finally, they were crushed beyond what he hoped was recognizability, he opened his satchel with his teeth and tried to drop the papers in. Some of them did find their mark; others fell to the table and to the floor.
“What are you doing?”
How could it not be apparent to Pastor Fischer what he was doing?
“Handwriting!” he screamed at the same time he walked from behind the table and trod upon those fallen pages of his declaration.
When he was halfway toward the much larger and more imposing table at which sat the magistrates, he stopped and turned to face neither his judges nor his accusers but rather some indeterminate being who might be hanging by his neck from the gilt-metal and cut-glass thirteen-light chandelier that added a touch of frivolous dissipation to the solemnity of injustice. Stamping his foot as he once again roared, “Handwriting!” he discovered he could make it tinkle.
“You want to judge my handwriting when sitting over there with my daughter is the man with the worst handwriting in all of Germany. Have you troubled yourself, Your Worship, to look at the way Herr Schumann writes? If it is true that the eyes are the windows to the soul—and Herr Schumann is a squinter, as is clear for all in this courtroom to observe—then the fingers are surely the signposts of the conscience. With which part of the body, after all, is more intimacy achieved than with the fingers? And Schumann’s fingers can barely write a legible word. Small wonder—he crippled his own hand and by so doing destroyed the one career at which he might have been able to earn a sufficient living to begin to support the woman whose own career he would now cripple by marrying her. Nor are his lips much good for anything but such acts as would be unmentionable had he not insisted on my bringing them to the attention of this court. He has withdrawn from society in direct proportion to his pursuit of my daughter. And when he does converse, he mumbles, he whispers, sometimes he even whistles as if he thinks the rest of us are dogs. He is mystical and dreamy. He lives in his own world, this man, and that is where he belongs. He even drinks alone. He drinks so much that he is sometimes carried home by strangers. He drinks so much that he will be of no use to my daughter as she tours the world and he will be expected to accompany her and to converse with kings and queens. She was made Royal and Imperial Chamber Virtuosa to her Imperial Highness Empress of Austria and handed fifty gold ducats by the empress herself, fifty ducats that I shall be happy to produce in this court as evidence. Can you imagine if Herr Schumann had been there to receive these ducats. He would have spent them immediately on drink. He would have mumbled to the empress, ‘Why no ducats for me, the composer?’ Have you heard his music, your worship? Probably not, for it is nearly impossible to perform. I have been its greatest champion, and even I am more perplexed by it than I am by the behavior of those who shake their heads and cover their ears when they hear it. A husband must support a wife, even if the wife is more famous than he. How will he support her with this music of his? Where is his Freischütz? Where is his Don Giovanni? And how will she, in turn, run their household? A wife must run the household, even if she is more famous than her husband. But my daughter is an artist. She was raised to be an artist. She cannot make the same bed that she is capable of lying in all day long. She cannot bake a fish. She cannot dust a keyboard except by scales. Perhaps if her mother had not abandoned us in shame…But she would still remain an artist, and artists are not meant to keep a house, satisfy a husband’s whims, or tie around her waist some apron of children who cause her knees to swell and her precious fingers to go numb with worry. An artist is a flower. An artist needs a gardener who will nourish her, not a husband who will block the sun and finally cut her down. Can you be so blind, Your Worship, that you cannot see that to allow this marriage will be to commit a crime against art, against society, against me, and even against these two impatient consummators, one still a child, the other a seducer of that child?”
“Blind?” said Pastor Fischer. “You call me blind? You are out of order, sir. You stand there staring off into space, stomping your foot like a child, and you dare to call me blind. I am not too blind to be able to judge handwriting. From what I see in my hand, the letters signed by Anonymous and Lehmann have been written by the same hand, despite some effort on the part of the writer to disguise this fact. All that remains is to discover whether that same man is the same man who wrote your declaration. Bring me—”
“Do you mean to say”—Wieck charged toward Pastor Fischer and stopped only when both other magistrates rose and leaned across that worthy’s body—“to say that you believe someone else wrote my declaration? I am outraged.”
“Your rage is as apparent, Herr Wieck, as your sagacity is invisible. Now give me a page from your declaration and sit down!”
Wieck made sure, as he bent to pick up the pages of his declaration, that his backside was in direct address to Pastor Fischer, who, when he finally held the declaration in his hand, proclaimed it to have been written by the same man who had written the two letters.
All that remained was the calling of witnesses. Clara and Schumann had felt the need to parade forth half a dozen in their favor, all of whom Wieck attacked, except for Mendelssohn, who had become too much of a musical power in Leipzig to risk offending. Wieck allowed himself to go so far as to praise Mendelssohn’s own marriage two years earlier and to offer it as proof that he was not opposed to the marriage of a musician provided that musician was of the male gender.
“How old is your wife?” Einert asked Mendelssohn.
“Cécile is twenty,” answered Mendelssohn.
“And how old was she when you married?”
“Eighteen.”
“Too young?” asked Einert.
Mendelssohn looked across the courtroom at his wife and laughed.
Wieck’s two witnesses were Karl Banck and Louis Rakemann, each of whom testified to Schumann’s lewd behavior with countless women aside from Clara Wieck. So detailed a description of this behavior did Wieck extract from his witnesses that Pastor Fischer on several occasions interrupted their testimony to tell them they had made their point, only to have them go on to make it yet again.
“Whores?” asked Wieck.
“Whores,” said each of them.
Einert, after conferring with his clients, confined his examination of these two witnesses to one question each, the same question:
“Are you in love with Clara Wieck?”
“Yes,” said Banck.
“Forever,” said Rakemann.
Though Wieck called each of them a scoundrel and accused them of betraying him, he realized he would have felt no different had they answered in the negative. It was not that people might have loved his daughter to which he objected but that she might love in return and because of love squander her art. He no more wanted her with Banck or Rakemann than he did with Schumann, though he wanted her less with Schumann than he wanted anything in this world. If only he might persuade her to play the piano in this court, and persuade Pastor Fischer to allow her to play the piano in this court. He had not raised her, and taught her, and toured with her so she might leave his home and be burdened with one of her own. She belonged to the world, not to any man, including himself.
When Einert, the top of whose head Wieck could see entirely like a tiny, ugly island in the vast sad ocean, examined him directly, he asked if Wieck felt Clara was too young to marry Schumann.
“I have made myself clear on that,” Wieck answered.
“How old is she?”
“She was twenty on the thirteenth of September past.”
“And how old is Herr Schumann?”
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br /> “Too old for her.”
“Herr Schumann is twenty-nine, your worship,” Einert informed the court. “And how old was your wife when you married?”
“Twenty-two,” answered Wieck. “Past the age of consent.”
“Your first wife,” said Einert.
“I have no idea,” said Wieck. “I do not remember her.”
“Marianne Tromlitz was nineteen,” said Einert. “And you, sir, were thirty. She was younger than your daughter is now, and you were older than Herr Schumann. As for your second wife, you are, are you not, twenty years older than she?”
“But she is a good wife,” said Wieck.
“And your daughter will not be a good wife?”
“My daughter is a musician.”
Schönefeld
SEPTEMBER 12, 1840
Marriage is happy only before the wedding.
George Sand
He married her with music. Even as they stood silently before his old schoolboy friend from Zwickau, August Wildenhahn, who was now pastor of this tiny village church in Schönefeld, she could feel in Robert music she could not hear. It filled him, and her, and the church, in which an old woman played hopelessly upon an organ, as if she too were aware of what could not be heard but still could not be silenced. He was restless, agitated, like an innocent man about to be released from prison into the arms of the only one of whom he’d dreamed. His hand was hot in hers, trembling; his eyes burned into her neck and shoulders, and when they met her eyes they closed not only upon themselves but upon hers as well, which yielded to his sight of this, their wedding.
Small as the church was, Pastor Wildenhahn’s words echoed in its emptiness. Only her mother was there, come from Berlin, and one common friend of theirs, Ernst Becker, who had, three years before, in Nanny’s absence (Nanny, whom her father, for her role in their love affair, had recently discharged!), arranged for them to meet in secret so they might hold one another through the kind of blissful night they would never again, from this day forth, have to seize from the terrible geography of separation.
It was, Robert realized, fitting that the church be so sparsely populated. Not that they had no friends, for they did, both shared and separate. And they both owned family, though his had been reduced to a single brother, Carl, his parents gone, his brothers, his sister Laura dead at birth before his own and therefore mourned in shadow, his cherished, unforgotten Emilie, so death itself might have attended in their stead were this not the very antithesis of death, this marriage. Yet he and Clara had been so alone in the four years since they had declared their love—not without others but without themselves together—that the unencumbered benches and the still oak beams and the sweet untasted morning air were appropriate to their forced seclusion. Whenever she had left him, the world had emptied out. There seemed no reason for it to fill back in now that they were being joined forever. If life had abandoned him, let him now abandon life by claiming for his own its fairest flower. He needed no more than what he gained this day. He needed none but her.
But she, he knew, was in need of one who was not there. Her father, who had brought such pain into their lives and whom she had, with his confused approval, invited to their wedding, had stayed away and by his absence hurt her further. How, she wondered, could her father understand her so little and misjudge her so much that he might think there was not room inside her for both music and the only man, aside from him, she had ever loved? Witness my happiness, she called to him, as she pledged to God and those two attending that she would love none other than the man beside her and him forever.
Had her mother and Ernst Becker not accompanied them in the coach on the short ride back to Leipzig, they might have tossed aside their wedding clothes and let the bouncing of the wheels ease them with its rough surprises into married life. Pastor Wildenhahn, who was traveling behind in his own coach, had brought to the wedding a traditional Lust, which Robert had declined to wear. But when they arrived at Clara’s mother’s sister’s house, where some friends had gathered to celebrate, Robert donned that garish headpiece and took Clara in his arms and reenacted a far more immodest version of their wedding than had taken place that morning. As he removed the Lust from his head and placed it upon Clara’s (where he had to hold it so it would not sink down to nose or chin), he gave a little speech in English just so he might joke about his lust for his new wife, which, given the occasion, was found inoffensive by all present, especially since it could not have been inspired by drink. For only then was the first drink served, champagne, and Robert moved from English into German as he toasted his wife and recalled what he said was already a whole life spent together. With tears in his eyes, he spoke not of those who did not attend but those who could not, the dead, including his old and greatest friend Ludwig Schunke, whose life and death had taught him, as so too had his love for Clara, that forever and ever, Lust und Leid, joy and pain, are joined.
“As I shall demonstrate in song,” he said.
The evening before, on what is a traditionally raucous Polterabend that celebrates a wedding come the morn but for them had been quiet and private, as if a noisy celebration might provoke the envy of gods, he had given her a book of songs, music for the piano and the voice. Now he had her bring it forth to show their guests and to say the words he had inscribed to her.
“‘To my beloved bride, Clara, on the eve of our wedding. I was completely inside you while composing these songs. From your Robert,’” she read with a strange sense that there were too many of her now, too much happiness, the bride, the wife, the woman who the night before had been surprised by such a gift, the woman named whose name she had just read….Before, she had been one thing only: a woman longing with all her being for one man. Now that he was hers, and she his, and she might have expected herself to be reduced to a tiny knot of satisfaction, she found herself split within herself, among her selves, pieces of her flying whole and formed and giddy quite beyond her reach.
It was a beautiful book, bound in red velvet, printed in gold, wreathed by myrtle leaves, from those flowers sacred to Venus and, in a way more earthly, sacred to a German bride, especially his own, who had somewhere, far beyond his teaching, learned to love, the mother of Eros in the body, still, of a girl becoming woman in his arms. As a frontispiece he had inserted an etching of Adam and Eve Created by God in the Earthly Paradise from the doors of the cathedral of Hildesheim, cast in bronze at around the time of the millennium by an artist whose name was lost forever, a fact that purified—indeed, sanctified—his or her effort. While all true art is an expression of the inner being of the artist, and the artist lives in perpetual battle with his work as with himself, death bestows their disengagement; all artists then become anonymous, all art is rescued from the self’s seizure. He was Adam; she was Eve. Here they were like children, naked, arms outstretched, vaulting into union. Earth, for once, was Paradise. The artist, unnamed, unknown, was God.
He took the book from her and put it on the piano and opened it to its first song and placed his fingers over the keys and took a breath and…stopped. Clara thought he must want a cigar. He seemed to have forgotten to smoke this whole day, which pleased her now that she thought of it, not because she objected to his smoking—she was virtually addicted to it herself, through him, the sweet, dusty smell of it in his hair and on his skin—but because it meant he had concentrated his pleasure wholly upon herself. Even now, she found, he did not stop to smoke but once again to talk. She had not seen him so wordy in company since the days before her father had forced them apart, before they had proclaimed their love. Once he had told her he loved her, and showed her he loved her, he seemed to have withdrawn from the world in favor of some concentration equally upon his pleasure and the pain it brought him. “When I have you,” he had once told her, “I need no others. And when I cannot have you, I need no others even more.”
“Before I sing,” he told those waiting for him to do precisely as he’d promised, “I should explain two things. One is that
I cannot sing. I play the piano better than I sing, and everybody knows through the advertisement of Herr Wieck that I have not played the piano well since the day this hand committed suicide.” He held it up and nearly laughed at the passing thought that he might entertain them with his oxshit story. But he was a married man now, and that was the kind of tale told by the boy he hoped he’d put to rest that morning in Schönefeld. “And the other…the other thing I must explain is how I came to write these songs.”
She listened as he told them with a strange dispassion how he had begun to write music to words, and thus to abide by the rhythmic constraints of the words themselves and their concourse through each line of the poetry he chose both to unveil and to clothe with the sound beyond sound that was music. All his life he had disdained vocal music. To sing poetry was no better than to recite aloud a piano sonata, note by note. It might be prettier, but it was still an insult to the purity of art, whether it was poetry or instrumental music by itself. Music was meant to be born completely within the soul and not to find its inspiration in something outside the composer, whether it was the poetry of Chamisso or Rückert or even Heine or it was…
“You!”
It was almost like an accusation, the way he seized upon her with his eyes and his open hand held out to her, not that she might grasp it or even approach it but to put her on display, to present her as corporeal evidence of his inspiration.
“You are these songs. That’s what happened to me. When I allowed myself to believe the court would rule in our favor and this very day would arrive that was a day so wrapped in darkness and uncertainty it could not even be dreamed, I started to sing to you. Wherever you were, I sang to you. Space and time retreat before the sound of song. I entered you with song. I was ecstatic. I was brimming over with music. I was so utterly at the mercy of melody I thought I might drown in it and take you with me. All the terrible things that were said about me, about you, all the disgrace to which we were subjected and the humiliation we were made to feel because we loved each other more than love has loved before…oblivion! I wrote so much I felt inhuman. I thought I could die of the pleasure. Please…I want to sing myself to death, like the nightingale.”