by J. D. Landis
Dr. Hasenclever cooperated in this vision. While Robert bathed in the hot water he had prescribed, Dr. Hasenclever sat by him.
“I have sent Frau Schumann away. You must never tell her you tried to take your life.”
“Take my life? I was not taking it. I was giving it.”
“Suicide is not a gift.”
“Or perhaps I simply have no gift for it.”
He went directly from the bath to bed and then, shortly, in dry, warm clothes, to his study, where he tried to write down the music he’d heard in the river and, failing that, went back to work on variations of the theme in E-flat major sent to him he had now decided by Schubert alone. Mendelssohn, too, was fading from his mind. As he wrote it, he could hear Clara playing it. He could not see her or feel her or even imagine her, only hear the music rise out of her fingers upon his fingers upon his pen.
His wife had left him, not as a wife leaves a husband but as a person leaves himself, leaking away slowly over time, taking everything.
He kept hold of Dr. Hasenclever’s hand in the carriage transporting him to Endenich. In his other hand, he grasped a bouquet of flowers Dr. Hasenclever said had been sent by Frau Schumann for the journey. He gave a flower to Dr. Hasenclever and to each of the two guards who rode with them. He saved a flower for each of the two drivers who alternated shifts over the eight-hour journey. The rest of the flowers he stared at in order to see the faces of his children.
He had last held flowers in a carriage on the night of their wedding, on their way to their new home on Inselstrasse in Leipzig.
It was almost midnight when they arrived, almost September 13, her twenty-first birthday. They could have married on that date without her father’s, and thus without the court’s, permission. That their wedding day should have been on her final day without legal freedom had not been planned by them—it was the first possible Saturday after the time necessary for the reading of the banns—but this confluence of wedding and birthday, of justice and revenge, was like some happy trick of fate and an augury of future happiness for their marriage.
He rushed her into bed, or tried to, one eye on the clock, the other on her, until she disappeared into what he did not immediately realize was the bathroom, because this apartment was as new to him as marriage. It might be like all other apartments, in that it was made up of separate rooms, but he didn’t know how its spaces sat in relation to one another, as he didn’t know how the girl he had loved for as long as he remembered loving could possibly be loved any more as his wife.
When she reappeared, she was wearing the frilly peignoir he had placed within the trousseau he’d given her. As a bride, estranged from family, cut off, she had come with nothing but herself. He wanted to give her, as well as be for her, everything.
Her hair was down, brushed, as if she had knowingly given meaning to the garment she hugged against her nakedness, and as she lay down next to him on their bed he saw she was wearing something else that was new. She had painted her eyelids. He had always found them attractive, permissibly so even when she was a little girl and they were, like the lips, the body’s conspicuous portents of future happiness, or of whatever happiness is brought by the kind of imperative attraction he felt toward her, that longing for release and capture both.
He brought the candle closer.
“What is that on your eyes?”
“Do you like it?”
He touched his finger to it, one lid, then the next.
“Is it blue? I can’t tell in this light.”
“A different blue.”
“Different from what?” On stage, she sometimes wore liner, but she had never painted her lids, so far as he knew.
“From any other blue.”
“What is it?”
“It’s called Manna. I bought it for tonight. It’s supposed to be…well, is it?”
“Is it what?”
“If it is, I shouldn’t have to tell you.”
“It’s very beautiful on you.”
“Thank you. But that’s not what it’s supposed to be. I mean, it’s supposed to do more than look good. Though I’m glad you think it looks good.”
“It is a most unusual blue.”
“It’s made of woad.”
“Woad!”
“You know about woad? I should have known. You know about everything.”
He put his nose, as he had put his finger, first to one lid, then to the other.
“Why are you sniffing me? Do I smell funny?”
“Woad was used anciently as a dye. It’s what the women of Lemnos were said to be wearing that caused their husbands to reject them.”
“Everyone knows that the men of Lemnos had no taste!” She laughed; whether at her own pseudopedantry or in mockery of his customary pedagogery, he could not tell. “No eye for beauty whatsoever. Unlike yourself.”
“The men of Lemnos may have liked the way their women looked with woad on them, wherever they happened to put it. What they didn’t like was how their women smelled.”
“I don’t smell!” It was a most feminine cry of truth and question all in one.
“Not like the women of Lemnos. Who, by the way, slaughtered their men, each and every one of them, with one exception, Thaos, who—”
“I am wearing Manna to attract you. I was told it would arouse you.”
“Me?”
“Any man.”
“Look at the time.” He brought forth his watch from the night-table.
“The women of Leipzig are known to kill their men who look at the time during the making of love.”
“Midnight. Your birthday. You are a woman at last.”
“You made a woman of me years ago in Dresden, Robert. Now make me your wife.”
*The duel between Liszt and Thalberg had taken place in Paris at the instigation, as well as at the grand home, of Princess Cristina Belgiojoso, who seized upon an opportunity not only to raise money for her cherished Italian refugees but to secure her place, as indeed she did, as one of the immortal impresarias. She charged forty francs a seat and, after the Gazette Musicale compared the impending confrontation to the battles between Rome and Carthage, filled them not only with society folk, who could afford the tariff and were genetically disposed to appreciate the gladiatorial aspect of such supposedly refined combat, but with the likes of Chopin, Berlioz, and Heine, who reported on the palpitating breasts and impassioned breathing that accompanied Liszt’s performance and, more to the point, satisfied most everyone’s general lust when he wrote, “The keys themselves appeared to bleed.” Princess Belgiojoso, called upon to declare the winner, said, “Thalberg is the best pianist in the world.” After allowing time for Thalberg and his supporters to absorb this apparently benign judgment, she seemingly expunged them from existence altogether when she appended: “Liszt is the only pianist in the world.” (It was no secret that she and Liszt had briefly been lovers. Nor would it have occurred to Thalberg, or anyone else, to assume that so cosmopolitan a saloniste would have allowed such intimacy, whether past or present, to influence her judgment. Art and sex had no such congress; a lover was only a lover, but a great artist was a god.) Clara herself never engaged in such a duel, but they have remained commonplace among musicians, including the “octave Olympics” between Artur Rubinstein and Vladimir Horowitz. But probably the most famous confrontation after Thalberg/Liszt took place a century later in Nightsie Johnson’s bar in Harlem, New York, where Billie Holiday egged on Coleman Hawkins by calling her putative lover Lester Young “the only tenor saxophone in the world,” inspiring Hawkins to accompany her so passionately as not only to obliterate Young’s coincident efforts but to cast into doubt forever whether Pres and Lady Day had indeed ever made together, in the parlance of jazz musicians, such music as puts the bone in the microphone.
*As had Bach before him. It was Chopin who said, “In my opinion, Beethoven was tormented by the idea of Bach.” And it was Brahms himself who was to say, in reference to Beethoven, “You can’t imagine h
ow it feels to have to live beneath his giant shadow.”
Part Five
The Breakdown Dialogues
Endenich
MARCH 10, 1854
Does he ask for me?
Clara Schumann
“I’m not a psychicist,” said Dr. Richarz.
“Nor I,” said Schumann.
“Nor a doctor.”
“I’d thought you were.”
“I meant you. You are not a doctor.”
“Nor a psychicist. As I stated.”
“They are my credentials, Herr Schumann, being presented here. Yours are known to me and to all my staff.”
“I’d never thought of madness as a credential.”
“I was referring to the brilliance of your compositions.”
“You flatter me. I think. Are you saying I’ve come to live in your madhouse because my work is brilliant?”
“You’ve come to live in my institution because you tried to kill yourself. Your doctors also felt you posed a threat to your wife.”
“Who?”
A Brief History of Endenich
Dr. Franz Richarz claimed not to be a psychicist. He did not believe in the talking cure and the old-fashioned imposition of rules of behavior upon the anarchy of a mind gone mad. He belonged to the new school in German psychiatry. He was an organicist. He believed that the mind was part of the body and not some indefinable, unseeable, unknowable, unfathomable, untreatable piece of cloud that floated in our heads and for all we knew when we died floated out our ears into the limitless beyond. The mind was not our soul, which was fortunate, because if it were, we would all be mindless, would we not?
And yet, Dr. Richarz was an adherent also of the progressive ideas concerning psychiatric practice that he had taken from “Romantic Medicine,” so conceived and named by Dr. Carl Gustav Carus, who had not only treated Herr Schumann in Dresden but was cousin to Dr. Ernst August Carus, with whose wife, by strange coincidence, Herr Schumann had once, he seemed eager to confess to Dr. Richarz, been in love and, by even greater coincidence, in whose very home he met Clara Wieck (“I remember her,” he said, “I remember that moment”) for the first time, at the very instant he was sitting with Frau Carus at the piano, attempting as always to seduce her, she having accomplished the same with him a year before when he was sixteen and he heard from her lips his first Schubert song and things got hot indeed in Colditz.
Romantic Medicine itself would certainly encourage someone like Herr Schumann to remember, for example, such a romance as this, regardless of the fact that it remained—outside the realm of fantasy and fantasy’s normal means of expression in young men—unconsummated.
Organicism would not. A patient must be ripped from his past, protected from it, for within the past, with its roots sometimes cruelly wrapped around the patient’s heart, lies the source of the patient’s agony. Thus, those closest to the patient were often denied access to him. This frequently brought relief to all parties: The patient was refused permission to receive visits from those who exacerbate the terror his body is causing his mind; and those very terrorists were refused permission to visit their victims, who so often were those they had pledged to God they would love and protect.
In this, Dr. Richarz followed the example of Bruno Goergen, as he had in creating Endenich itself. Dr. Goergen had founded his own psychiatric clinic in Vienna at the turn of the century and had benefited enormously from this sudden accessibility to private care for the disproportionately large number of truly insane people spawned by the wealthy. It was Dr. Goergen who had first forbidden relatives to so much as look in on a troubled kinsman, who, he had noticed prior to this prohibition, invariably misinterpreted his relatives’ consoling words as criticism, his fiancée’s handwringing as gelding, and the tears and sighs of his collective family members not merely as omens of, but also supplications for, doom. In Bruno Goergen’s most widely quoted, if controversial, pronouncement, “The patient all too often sees his dear wife as a mixer of poison, his loving children as demons, his charming home as a prison. He hears voices heard by no one else.”
As he knew was common for many people who were going deaf, Dr. Richarz also heard voices. But while they came not from the mouths of devils, as Herr Schumann reported his did, they similarly called his work into question. They came from himself, his own voice divided, as he felt himself divided, trapped as a doctor between the Enlightenment of the last century and its emphasis upon reason, and the Romanticism of this century and its emphasis upon passion. It was reasonable to assume that people went mad because of a sickness in the brain; it was also reasonable to assume that people went mad because of, for want of a better word, life.
Thus he was torn between a desire to chop open Robert Schumann’s head to have a look inside, and to talk to him endlessly for as long as it might take to understand what happens when an artist is attacked by his art.
Dr. Richarz was born in 1812, which made him two years younger than Schumann, though each felt the other was the older, the doctor because Schumann had been the conductor of an orchestra (to say nothing of the indisputable fact that he was older), and Schumann because he continued to feel he had leapt from childhood to the doors of death without passing through the house of life. Artists were children, waiting for a plate to be passed, too often finding it empty.
The doctor had turned to psychiatry in general and organicism in particular when, as a medical student in nearby Bonn, he had come under the influence of Friedrich Nasse, arguably the father of organicism, to say nothing of having been a friend of Goethe, which did much for one’s credibility. Dr. Nasse believed that all mental disease resulted from a disturbance of the heart and a disruption of the circulation of the blood. Therefore, instead of trying to impose his own morality upon his patients to get them to act the way he thought civilized, sane people should act, he treated them with medication (drugs and herbs both, including, during the period of his belief in autointoxication, cathartics) and physical therapy (saline baths, hydromineralization, climate cures, cupping, blistering, and the strangely pleasant, decidedly sensual bleeding by leeches).
After graduating from medical school and thus leaving the profound and benign influence of Dr. Nasse, young Dr. Richarz interned with Dr. Maximillian Jacobi at Germany’s largest asylum for the insane, in Siegburg. Dr. Jacobi, however, believed quite the opposite from Dr. Nasse. He was convinced that in at least 80 percent of the mentally ill, their symptoms were caused by problems with hygiene, discipline, and morality. This resulted in an inordinate amount of scrubbing, screaming, and preaching throughout the many buildings of the Siegberg lunatic facility.
After eight years as Dr. Jacobi’s closest assistant, Dr. Richarz quit.
“Not in a huff, I take it,” Schumann commented.
“Yes, as matter of fact, in quite a huff,” Dr. Richarz contradicted him.
“It took you eight years to work up a huff?”
“I am a doctor, Herr Schumann, not a musician. In my business we neither write nor receive reviews overnight.”
“So you earn your huffs?”
“The best huffs are those huffed slowly.”
“I should like to write you a Concerto for Huff,” Schumann offered. “But—”
“Now you are having fun at my expense, Herr Schumann.”
“—but no good piece of music has ever lasted eight years. Including Wagner’s.”
Dr. Richarz wondered whether this was some sort of veiled reference by his distinguished patient to the fact that a number of his doctors in the past had told him that his mental problems were the result not of his writing his music too slowly but the opposite: His unceasing but obsessively alacritous labor, for example on the epilogue of Faust, caused him to display such symptoms as shivering, faintness, pedal frigidity, insomnia, fear of heights, antipathy toward all metal, keys in particular, which meant he kept getting locked out of his own house, just like his famous ancestor Gotthold Lessing, and, of all things, a dread of death. Dr. H
elbig, his homeopathic physician at the time, told him these were precisely the symptoms found in mentally ill accountants, which was no surprise to Dr. Helbig, because music and accountancy were sister disciplines, given their governance by numbers. Was it any wonder that doctors, of all professions, most considered their colleagues to be idiots.
Leaving Dr. Jacobi’s hugely disillusioning and disillusioningly huge organization, Dr. Richarz did what many idealistic young people do when they discover in a job that they have been violating their own principles at the same time they have been kissing the ass of the megalomaniac who happens to be their boss: He went into business for himself.
In 1844, in Endenich, a suburb of Bonn, he bought a beautiful seven-acre estate that had been owned by the Kaufmann family until during the Napoleonic wars it was taken over by law students from the University of Bonn, which like all good universities must, if it is wise, shut down when the soldiers start following, like a German lecher his German helmet, their bayonets through a city looking for students in whom to matriculate.
Upon his purchase of the asylum, which he came to call, resisting any doctor’s natural temptation to give it his own name, Endenich, Dr. Richarz set about remodeling in order to make it the most comfortable, civilized, progressive, expensive, and exclusive private home for the insane in all of Germany. Most of the work his contractor performed was upon the main building, on the ground floor of which were built his examining rooms and living quarters for his nurse. On the first floor, above, was where the patients were to live, fourteen of them, no more. Dr. Richarz had been willing to sacrifice for the intimacy of truly personal care the income to be derived from a larger population of patients as well as the vastly greater amount of autopsy material, which to organicists was a kind of fleshly gold, particularly, of course, the brain.
So it was that when Robert Schumann was admitted on March 4, 1854, he was given a room on the first floor, just over the heavily bolted front door and seemingly cradled by the fanned hands of two adolescent oaks on either side of that door. It should be said, however, that he was one not of fourteen patients but of sixty. Dr. Richarz had either overestimated how much money might come in from so few patients or underestimated how many crazy people were being produced in Germany, particularly in the post-Revolution years, following 1848, a period not unlike that ushered in by Clemens Wenzel Nepomuk Lothar Duke von Metternich after the Vienna Congress of 1815, in its social stagnation, its authoritarianism, its repression, its failure to unify Germany’s thirty-nine separate states, and its utter defeat of the humanistic ideals of romantic liberalism.