by J. D. Landis
Were not love and death the same, some final, inexpressible lament and celebration of the end of being? And was not music, like the two of them, insult to the grasp of life?
They sat together at the piano. They opened the book he’d given her. They began at the beginning. She played. He sang.
You are my soul, you are my heart,
You are my bliss, you are my pain,
You are the earth on which I live,
You are the sky in which I soar,
You are the grave in which
I have forever buried my sorrows.
Part Four
Marriage
AN INTERLUDE
SEPTEMBER 12, 1840 – MARCH 4, 1854
A life looked back upon seems to Robert Schumann both endless and compressed. It is, as his father had translated Byron, “where the day joins the past Eternity.” Time is melted into one vast iris, blind and sage at once. And he, Robert, lying in bed in Endenich, is the spouseless Adriatic, mourning his lady. The Siebengebirge painted on the windows by the sun in its asylum are his blue Friuli mountains.
He struggles to put on his glasses to see them but cannot see them. He will open his eyes to nothing but memory. What he remembers is putting on the glasses of his beloved friend Johannes and seeing Clara, walking beside him on the Endenich road, indistinguishable from Brahms until he gave the glasses back and Clara disappeared. And so did Brahms—into the train on his way back to her he embodied.
Everything but death is memory. And were death memory, he would be gone and she unseen except in memory, except in death. He would rather die than live but rather see her face than die. He has forgotten her. Except in memory. His mind is gone (the doctors say). Replaced, he knows, by memory.
Two weeks after Emil’s birth, he began to write The Little Book of Memories of Our Children. After three daughters, a son. He would have liked to have a child a year, to mark for all to see his love for their mother. And to mark, he must admit, his wife as his. Indeed, Emil arrived less than a year after Julie, too soon, perhaps—Robert’s fault entirely, not Clara’s, though she called him to their bed as often as he found her there awaiting him. Within weeks, another child coming. He knew how it had happened. But when? He began then to place a sign in their marriage diary, each time they made love. A quarter-note, the letter F, an unrequited phallus—he had no idea what it was, only what it meant. It was a secret sign, after all, but secret not from her, only from the children, who now had their own little book of memories.
Clara and he never named the new child. It was lost in the Frisian Island baths at Norderney, washed into eternity on a crimson wave of the mineral water in which Clara bathed. “One can never have enough children,” he had written to Mendelssohn. Because death did not allow it, he came to realize. As did Emil, who never recovered from the grief in his mother’s body and the relief in his parents’ minds. Emil, in his sixteen months on earth, died (as was said of Beethoven’s mother) without having smiled. But Ludwig, next, was named for Schunke, not Beethoven. And Ferdinand, hiding in his mother’s belly from the warring, revolutionary men who said they’d kill her, was named, in Robert’s mind alone, for Schubert’s brother.
It was, he remembers, with five children alive, one dead and buried, one never born but bled away at Norderney, that they moved from Dresden to Düsseldorf. There they would have one more at least together and she have two, not counting one more lost, again in the waters, this time at Scheveningen. Out of ten pregnancies in thirteen years, eight children born to her: three in Leipzig, three in Dresden, two in Düsseldorf. He misses most the one he’s never seen. Felix. She named him for Mendelssohn, who had been happy but, dead so young, not lucky. Happy and lucky, the same word. Glücklich. There was the German temperament: happiness a happenstance. One might earn one’s pain, but bliss was a bestowal. The truth was opposite. If only all grammarians (and philosophers) were musical.
As they were packing for the move to Düsseldorf, he wrote a story in his children’s Book of Memories.
The fish were bored with being forever in the water. “Outside,” they said, “the hot sun is shining, and everything looks beautiful and green. But we are deprived of all that, here in the water.” So they decided to drink the whole pond dry. They drank and drank. The water got lower and lower. Supreme was their joy when they found themselves on dry land with the hot sun shining beautifully down upon them. But their happiness did not last long. They became weaker and more lifeless from moment to moment. There was not a drop of water left in which to live their lives as fish. The sun shone brightly. They died in agony.
“What is the point of this story?” asked Clara.
“That all should keep to their element.”
“And what is our element?”
“Wherever we are not.”
Dresden was a city stifled by its railway mentality and by its conservative Court, too quiet even for musicians at their work, incapable of enthusiasm, as lifeless as Robert’s fish. Clara and he hated it equally (even more important in a marriage to be in antipathetic than commendatory concord) and took refuge in this bond and in their children. Her father gave her up to him and gave his name to the singer Minna Schulz, promoting her as Schulz-Wieck, calling her his daughter now, that silly girl who tried to sing the operas that so far as Dresdeners were concerned was the only music. The Dresden orchestra would not even play Beethoven’s symphonies for fear of alienating those who made donations to their pension fund.
He finished an opera of his own, Genoveva. He offered it to the Court Theater. But the Court conductor, Karl Reissiger (from whose home she had stolen fourteen years earlier, when she was only sixteen, to make her way for the first time to Robert’s bed in their private Hotel David), pronounced it not merely boring but “exceptionally boring.” Clara laughed. “Everything you do is exceptional.” He should have learned from Weber. Weber had refused to bring his operas to birth in Dresden, allowing Berlin, Vienna, and London to hear them first. So, for the premiere of Genoveva, Robert returned to Leipzig, where at least the citizens themselves subsidized the satisfaction of their cultural appetite and did not depend upon the patronage of the kind of feudal prince who would allow no one to eat what he could not stomach.
Robert conducted the opera himself, for two acts a singularly satisfying experience—to hear voices rise like birds out of the opening of one’s arms to the heavens. But then, at a crucial moment in the third act, the tenor singing Golo came onstage having forgotten the letter he was to hand to his master, Siegfried. It was the letter in which Siegfried’s wife, Genoveva, was falsely accused of the very adultery that Golo was desperate for her to commit with him. “Read it for yourself!” screamed Golo, handing Siegfried…absolutely nothing! Siegfried stared at the emptiness between him and Golo as if into an abyss. Then, like any sensible man staring into an abyss, he stepped back, and back again, until he was running away from this stark immateriality. And Golo, rather than pursue his benefactor—become, by tragic passion, rival—scurried around the stage. He was clearly determined to keep as much space as possible between him and the man to whom he had just handed the completely invisible and thus unreadable letter into which he had poured a potent mixture of his heart and his cunning. Neither man thought to sing the consequent text, which now made no sense but would surely have stanched the blood of asininity more effectively than the improvised, apologetic squawks they uttered in recitativo.
Robert held his arms aloft for as long as he could, an Atlas bearing the full weight of a failure not his own but wholly on his head. To bring them down, he thought, would be to put an end to music. Not merely his own—all music. But there was no music. The orchestra stopped. The singers merely sputtered. Only the audience sang, mumbling a hum of confusion, trilling forth a kind of stupefied delight.
But then he thought of Clara’s eyes upon him, felt them upon his back, holding him up, letting him see not the disaster before him on the stage but herself, behind him, both suffering with him and laughi
ng at so absurd a permutation in his tragically romantic (or was it the other way around?) tale. Those huge, blue-black eyes. He sometimes felt he had no peace except when he could disappear within them and let them take him from a world in which he felt the less at ease the more he lived. Her eyes—which he could see at night even when the bedroom candle or the bedroom lamp was out, a blackness in her eyes that extinguished all the lesser darkness painted on the mind by failure and by fear, drawn across the face of life by death. She was the very opposite of Shelley’s witch, for her beauty made the dim world bright. He was within them now, her eyes, which hid him from such accidents of fate as this, a letter lost, forgotten, a marriage doomed on stage, as his own was nourished through misfortune.
Let Genoveva turn a comic opera then. He lowered his arms, smiled at the orchestra and singers, shook his head in sympathetic consternation, and sang for them, without the words, the melody that soon enough, his arms upraised again, they played and sang for him.
What he wanted in melody—what he had always wanted in melody—was not something that people would sing so much as what would sing within people. One might come away whistling from an Italian opera; from a German opera one must emerge reborn, into both the silence of awe and the thunder of creation.
It was on one of their walks through the wooded hills along the Elbe that Robert managed to get Richard Wagner to stop talking long enough to say, “The first two chords of Beethoven’s Third Symphony have more melody than ten Bellini arias.” To which Wagner responded, “Peps, my dog, has more melody than ten Bellini arias.”
Wagner had been born three years after Robert. They shared, among many other things that should have made them close, the presence of Napoleon at their births. In Robert’s case, the emperor was marching east through Zwickau, though soon enough he would be heading toward the devastation of his Russian campaign, spreading along the way the typhoid that would send Robert into the arms of Frau Ruppius and the infant Wagner’s father, Friedrich, into the arms of death. Wagner claimed to remember the sounds of the cannons at Bautzen. He delighted in comparing the vibrations he felt from those distant cannons while still in the amniotic sac with those he experienced five months later as he lay in his crib in Leipzig as what came to be called (with the usual vainglorious striving for slaughter’s significance) the Battle of Nations was being fought around him and Napoleon was finally driven back toward Mainz, back toward Paris itself, where soon enough the city would fall in almost delicate counterpoint to the Empire’s annihilation.
“You can hear it in my use of rhythm,” explained Wagner. He sang from Lohengrin, first “Ye wandering breezes” and then “Too long I stay—I must obey the Grail!”
Lohengrin! Robert had spent a year taking notes on an opera about the Round Table. Then, one day, Wagner called together a group of his friends and read them the entire libretto of his new opera. Lohengrin! Robert went home and threw his notes in the fire.
Yet Robert still made the mistake of going to Wagner as his authority on subjects for German opera: “What shall I write about? Faust? The Blacksmith of Gretna Green? Abelard and Héloïse? Tristan and Isolde? Doge and Dogaresse? The Odyssey? The Tempest? Sakontala? The Peasants’ Revolt of 1525?”
Wagner shook his head at each of these worthy ideas and finally said, “Why don’t you write an opera about Minna, my wife.”
“You want me to write an opera about your wife!”
“Well, not exactly about my wife. But something you would call Minna. She would love to have an opera with the same name as herself. And it would look like marital sycophancy for me to come forth with one, not that I could ever call something Minna—it is not a grand enough name for what I write. But for you it would be perfect. You will base it on your relative Lessing’s Minna von Barnhelm. You see, I have thought out the whole thing. You’ll call it Minna. It will make my wife very happy and it will ease you in your pain for having to move your chair forever from the Round Table.”
As it happened, the only thing Robert took from Minna von Barnhelm was the idea of a heroine unjustly accused of a crime, which he found in Friedrich Hebbel’s Genoveva. But when he showed Wagner the libretto for his Genoveva, so disappointed was Wagner in not having the name Minna as its title that he attempted to sabotage the whole effort, particularly in his advice that the entire third act be eliminated.
But what could one expect from someone who insisted that Bach’s great experiments in counterpoint needed lyrics? To the vivacious Fugue in G, Wagner sang, “Oh, how much like a child, how much like little boy are you, little boy are you,” while to the funereally repetitious march of the G-flat Prelude he complained in a kind of anticipation of his Schopenhauerian obsession, “Life holds such pain, yes, life holds such woe, yes, life holds such grief, yes, life holds such hurt, yes, life holds such…”
Robert had no use for what Wagner called the “music of the future.” They disagreed on almost everything and everyone, Mendelssohn in particular, whom Wagner dismissed as a mere “Jew technician” among the swarming colony of Jewish worms in the dead body of art and whose early death, along with Chopin’s, left Robert wondering (until Brahms turned up on his doorstep!) where the true music of the future would come from.
Peps the dog, he has learned from someone who has visited him here in Endenich—probably Bettina von Arnim, who in old age has like many passionate women sought in gossip what she formerly found in concupiscent whisperings—is dead. In his place there is Fips. Fips was a gift from Wagner’s young Swiss mistress, Mathilde Wesendonk, whose husband gave in coin what his wife gave in more succulent specie. But Mathilde had also given Wagner a gold pen, which he said had turned him into a calligraphic pedant. This was more troublesome to contemplate even than a replacement for the despicable Peps. Or a replacement for the pitiable Minna. This was a pen! The image of it diminished the value of his own steel pen from Beethoven’s grave, which sits now unused on the table by his bed while Wagner in Zurich writes no doubt prolifically with his gold pen of Tristan and Isolde, one more idea they shared and Robert has lost.
Wagner had discovered Schopenhauer and sent him a copy of Gottfried von Strassburg’s original Tristan poem, thinking the philosopher would be moved by this tragic tale of love and the gift to love of suicide. But, in splendid irony, Schopenhauer despised the strategems of love by which a man might sacrifice his life to win a woman. What was a woman compared to a dog? The great love of Schopenhauer’s life was his poodle!
Wagner got no acknowledgment from Schopenhauer. But from Schopenhauer’s work he received the notion of the final denial of the will to live. Never having enjoyed the true bliss of love himself, he would drown Tristan and Isolde in it, suffuse them with it, give them a satiety so complete it could be achieved not through the act of physical love but only through death. The denial of the will to live was redemptive. Death through desire became a saintly death. The body and the spirit were finally joined. And in the only possible way. Through the denial of the will to live. Through suicide.
Robert has tried to starve himself to death. He was inspired in this, however, less by Wagner than by Nikolay Gogol, of whom he thinks now and then when he gets hungry. Gogol starved himself too, though for the most understandable if stupidest of reasons: In a fit of self-disgust he had thrown his writing, handful by handful, into the fire, only to discover too late that among the pages burned were the only ones he’d meant to save, those to a second volume of Dead Souls. All were gone, irrecoverable, either from the fire or from his mind, the latter of which he had expected would be unburdened by the burning of his papers but instead was itself inflamed by discontent, regret, frustration, insanity—many an artist’s companions on the path to flitting fulfillment. Gogol is filled with a remorse a thousand times more painful than what Robert felt when burning up his labors toward an opera on the Round Table. Gogol wants to die. Gogol wants to die as slowly as it took a piece of writing to emerge from mind to paper. Gogol wants to die by taking nothing in, the way an artist
lives by giving forth. It is the perverse nourishment of the self-forsaken. It is the starvation not of the body but of the body’s song; it is the starvation of the voice.
It was Ivan Turgenev who told him about Gogol. And it was that old lecheress Bettina von Arnim who told him during her visit to Endenich that Turgenev had been unfaithful to his great love, the magnificent if ugly mezzo-soprano Pauline Viardot, who just happens to be one of Clara’s best friends. And with whom had Turgenev been unfaithful? A pianist, naturally, Bettina had seemed delighted to inform Robert, as if to imply that no man could resist the sight of a woman’s bottom on a piano bench.
Sometimes Robert wonders if he loves Clara as much as Turgenev loves Pauline, infidelity notwithstanding—Turgenev’s, for Robert could no more have been unfaithful to Clara, once they were married, than a bird could betray its own song by singing another’s.
When they were apart, Turgenev begged Pauline to send him the cuttings from her fingernails. And all Robert has requested from Clara are some music paper and newspapers and cigars and pictures of her and of the children and of Johannes and a ribbon from her hair or hat to tie around her letters or to use as a bookmark and perhaps an atlas or two with which to plan his escape.
But, then, there is something about his marriage to Clara that has made her less lovable. Not to himself, no, but to other men. She had been such a beautiful girl, even if she had never in her life considered herself beautiful. But it was not her beauty that had captured him, not solely, but her spirit, her passion, her abandon, her fund of perversity, the ways she had teased and tricked and amused and aroused and seduced him. And now—if he could speak of now, not having seen her in so long and longing so to see her—she had grown into a kind of severity, from her dark dresses to the way she wore her hair stretched back from her face to her condemnation in others what she had enjoyed so much herself.