by J. D. Landis
Herr Schumann himself was a victim of this postrevolutionary trauma. But he didn’t seem to realize it, because while people had been destroyed all around him, the composer not only went on composing but was, by his own admission, as contentedly productive as he had ever been. Whether this was madness or sanity, however, Dr. Richarz was happy not to judge. As noble as it may be to defend one’s ideals, one’s home, one’s children, with force, it cannot be done successfully without losing one’s mind. But the same might be said, to judge from Robert Schumann, of the writing of music.
But what music it was! Dr. Richarz was convinced Herr Schumann was a genius. But when he had told him so, Herr Schumann looked at him as if he were mad.
Not one to let such a look pass by unremarked, Dr. Richarz said, “If someone were to tell me I am a genius, I would certainly not look at him as if he were, if you will pardon the expression, a madman.”
“That’s not a situation you need worry you may encounter,” answered Herr Schumann, in a rhetoric peculiar enough to force Dr. Richarz to ponder just what Herr Schumann might have meant. And by the time he finally captured the meaning of it, his patient was sitting there on the other side of the peculiar double-chair they shared, his hands over his ears, no doubt suffering from one of his aural hallucinations and certainly in no condition to be chastised for his sarcasm. At the same time, Herr Schumann was also staring up with a smile on his face at the stately Siebengebirge behind Königswinter on the far shore of the Rhine from whose waters he had been spared just, perhaps, that he might come here, though Dr. Richarz knew well that neither psychicist nor organicist believed in fate (which is where the Romantic psychiatrists diverted from both and in so doing took him with them down a path that could lead only to further confusion in his quest to understand the workings of at least someone else’s mind).
The reason Herr Schumann was forced to stare up through his window at the Siebengebirge, and not merely out at them, was that he was no longer on the first floor. So great had his fear of heights proved to be that he had had to be moved to the ground floor and thus more construction done, and done quickly, for the nurse’s one room was not sufficient as a place for a great composer to live. And so Herr Schumann’s living quarters consisted not only of the nurse’s old room, which had become his bedroom where he slept and, alas, smoked, in the half-shadow of his narrow French angel bed’s canopy, but also of no small portion of Dr. Richarz’s old examining rooms, which went into making Herr Schumann’s very pleasant sitting room, furnished to his own specifications: with a comfortable fauteuil, in which he seemed able to sit for hours with his smoking stand at his left elbow and an atlas on his lap; this strange dos-à-dos, which had the two of them, and anyone else Herr Schumann might be permitted to see in time to come, sitting with their backs to one another; a delicate teapoy stand, on which, perversely, he insisted only coffee be placed; an ingelnook, in a cranny by the fireplace, on which Dr. Richarz could not imagine anyone sitting; and in the middle of everything the very same square piano played upon by Franz Liszt on that day, not long after Dr. Richarz had first opened Endenich, when he walked down the road to Bonn and saw unveiled in the Münsterplatz a Beethoven rendered not only immortal in bronze but forever beyond understanding.
Endenich
MARCH 17, 1854
I like to watch Johannes while he plays.
Clara Schumann
“I have been sent to visit my son-in-law,” said Frau Bargiel.
“Sent by whom?” asked Dr. Richarz.
“My daughter, of course. His wife.”
“Sent for what reason?”
“Sent to visit him.”
“No. I meant, sent, why? Why were you sent? Why did she not come herself?”
“I have been tending to her in Düsseldorf. Young Herr Brahms and I.”
“Is she not well?”
“She has six children and another due in three months. Her husband has been taken from her. No, she is not well!”
Dr. Richarz touched her hand. “Such maternal passion.”
“May I visit him now?”
“No.”
“Is he sleeping?”
“To the contrary, I expect.”
“Then when may I see him?”
“You may see him whenever you like. But you may not visit him.”
“I don’t understand.”
“No visitors.”
“But why?”
“Agitation.”
He led her from his office to Schumann’s room. There were several small shutters in an exterior wall that looked like decoration and, but for one of them, were—decoration and deflection both. This exception he pushed aside, to reveal a peephole.
He looked first but quickly surrendered his spot to her.
Her son-in-law walked back and forth, back and forth, across his sitting room, heading each time directly for the piano and stopping just before he would bang into it. Finally, however, he did bang into it and fell to the floor.
She gasped.
“He hit the piano?” said Dr. Richarz.
“Yes.”
“And now he is on the floor?”
“Yes.”
“He is squeezing his hands together as if to wring blood out of them?”
“Why do you question when you know?” she asked.
“Agitation.” It was unclear whether this was an answer to her question.
Endenich
APRIL 20, 1854
Has he closed off his longing within himself?
Clara Schumann
Schumann was held on either side by his attendants, Herr Niemand and Herr Nämlich.
“Herr Nämlich,” directed Dr. Richarz.
“Herr Niemand,” Herr Nämlich corrected him.
“You always confuse us,” said Herr Niemand.
“I mistake you. It is you who confuse me.”
“Perhaps if we were not required to wear the same uniform …,” said Herr Nämlich.
“Outfit. Not uniform. Outfit. This is not a prison. And you are no longer in the army.”
“Perhaps if we were not required to wear the same … outfit,” said Herr Nämlich.
“Perhaps if you were not twins, Herr Niemand.”
“Herr Nämlich,” Herr Niemand corrected him.
“Forgive me,” said Dr. Richarz.
“And we are not even brothers.”
“Forgive me,” Dr. Richarz repeated, this time to Schumann, as he directed the two large, strong, seemingly identical attendants to hold out one of Schumann’s arms apiece so he might slip them into the straitjacket.
Endenich
APRIL 21, 1854
The whole time he has not asked after me even once.
Clara Schumann
Schumann was in bed, no longer restrained.
“Am I alive?”
“I hope so,” replied Dr. Richarz.
“Hope so?”
“Can you see me?”
“Of course I can see you. Have you given up organicism for optometry?”
“You make me laugh, Herr Schumann.”
“That, I cannot see.”
“I said you make me laugh.”
“Evidence to the contrary.”
“Can you see me?”
“Not laughing.”
“If you can see me, and you are dead, then what am I?”
“Dead.”
“Aha! That is why I say I hope you are alive.”
“That is why?”
“For your own sake, too, of course. But tell me: Why did you ask?”
“About optometry?”
“No. Whether you are alive.”
“Because I thought I was dead. I thought I was in Heaven.”
“Of course.”
“You knew that?”
“Only because you proclaimed it. Screamed it, in fact—deliriously. That you were in Heaven, and you saw your first wife there.”
Schumann tried to sit up in bed. He was excited enough almost to succeed. “I did
!”
“Your first wife?”
“Yes!”
“How many wives have you had?”
“I’ve never had yours.”
“Of your own.”
“None.”
“Then how do you account for the fact that you saw your first wife in Heaven?”
“Because she was dead.”
“Did you want to kill your wife?”
“No need—she’s in Heaven.”
“And your second wife?”
“She’s in Düsseldorf.”
“You do remember her.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. How could I? I’ve been married but once.”
“That much is true, Herr Schumann. And yet you say you’ve had no wives. How can this be?”
“How can this be?” Schumann pounded his fist on his mattress. “Am I still tied up?”
“Can you not tell?”
“I feel tied up. I feel in the grip of something.”
“That’s the medication. I didn’t like you in the jacket. I had it removed. I would prefer to restrain you from within.”
“Ah, medication. Pharmakon. Did you know it means both remedy and poison? It’s the word Socrates used in Phaedrus to describe what writing is. I’d considered being a writer. But I gave up writing for music. And I gave up music for Endenich. Or music gave me up to Endenich. And what have you given me? What medication? What remedy? What poison?”
“Chloral hydrate.”
“And here I had mistaken you for Dr. Clitandre.”
Dr. Richarz opened Schumann’s file in his lap and proceeded to look through its papers. “I have no record of your having been seen by a doctor of that name. If indeed that is his name. Was he your gynecologist?”
Schumann laughed.
“I thought it was pretty funny myself,” said Dr. Richarz.
“I’m laughing at the fact that you don’t know who Dr. Clitandre is.”
“Who is he then?”
“He doesn’t exist.”
“Then why did you say you had mistaken me for him? Are you trying to tell me I don’t exist? Just as your wife does not seem to exist for you?”
“Dr. Clitandre is a character in a play by Molière. He says he heals through words while other doctors use leeches and emetics and enemas.”
“Oh, I am a great believer in enemas,” said Dr. Richarz.
“Don’t speak to me of such things,” said Schumann. “I am asleep.”
“How can you be asleep and talking at the same time?”
He was by then having chloral hydrate dreams.
Endenich
MAY 29, 1854
His case is considered hopeless.
Dwight’s Musical Journal
Waving a magazine, Dr. Richarz approached Schumann where he was standing in the Endenich garden with Dr. Richarz’s nephew, Herr Oebeke, himself a medical student. They were supposed to be walking. The nephew enjoyed the fresh air much more than did the attendants, who usually ended up sitting with patients in a nearby tavern, proudly sedating them with drink while complaining that their salaries weren’t half that of the doctors. And Herr Oebeke walked them for free. But unlike the other patients, who always seemed grateful to be taken out for a relaxing stroll along the paths that produced an illusion of tranquility in the midst of a nature that had abandoned these ramblers to their minds’ caprices, Herr Schumann wasn’t walking. He was standing completely still, carrying on a conversation not with Herr Oebeke, who would have loved to talk to him about music and the famous wife he seemed unable to remember he had, but with himself.
“That is not true!” Herr Schumann remonstrated. “That is a lie!”
Herr Oebeke seemed delighted to see his uncle. He fairly fled across the grass, from the side of his ward.
“Herr Schumann is having a terrible argument with himself, Uncle Franz.”
“He hears things.”
“Music, I was led to understand. I had thought, when he stood still in the garden, to lean toward his head to listen. Imagine—to hear music in the making!”
“And did you?”
“Hear it?”
“Did you attempt to hear it? Did you listen?”
“I did,” Herr Oebeke confessed.
“That is wrong,” lectured his uncle. “You know I insist we respect our patients’ privacy.”
“You inject them with drugs, uncle. You feed them with tubes when they will not eat. And then you give them enemas when they will not… reimburse what they have eaten. Are these not invasions of privacy?”
“We do not put our heads up against theirs in order to hear their private music.”
“Only because you know you can’t hear it, uncle. It would seem to me that your very job is to invade your patients’ privacy. They are all privately mad, after all. They are all suffering in the terrible isolation of the insular self.”
Dr. Richarz put an absolving hand on his nephew’s shoulder. “And to think we are told that romanticism is dying.”
“Besides,” challenged Herr Oebeke, “how would you know Herr Schumann is hearing things if you didn’t listen to him yourself?”
“Oh, I do listen. But I listen to what he actually says rather than to what is said inside him. I listen to his voice when he talks to himself, and I listen to his voice when he talks to me. He hears things, it’s true. The music of life, he calls it, to which he says he dances a wild dance within himself. He hears voices no one else can hear. But I hear his rendition of these voices. And this is more important than hearing these voices themselves. For they are phantom voices. But his voice, reporting what they’ve said, is real.”
“And what do they say?”
“They say the worst thing a man could hear.”
“Oh, no!” said Herr Oebeke.
“Yes,” said Dr. Richarz gravely.
“How humiliating!”
“Do you have any idea what his voices say?”
“I can only imagine.” Herr Oebeke cringed.
“No, I don’t think you can.” Dr. Richarz moved away from his nephew and onto the grass toward Schumann, who stood rigidly in the middle of the garden path, only his head moving, as if slapped on either cheek successively, while he berated his invisible adversary. And then, whispering so that his nephew had to run up to him in order to hear, Dr. Richarz said, “The voices tell him that his work is not his own.”
“Whose do they say it is?”
“That’s hardly the point.”
“Then what is the point, uncle?”
“The point is that you should have to ask what the point is. What kind of world does he live in?”
“What kind of world do I live in?” Schumann bellowed.
“Herr Schumann?”
“He heard you, uncle.”
“What kind of world?” he asked argumentatively.
“This kind of world.” Dr. Richarz waved the magazine. “This is what I’ve come to show you. Dwight’s. All the way from Boston. An article about you. Of course it’s last month’s issue. So it is old news to you if new news to the world.”
“Does it review my Faust?”
“No, it does not.”
“My Faust begins in a garden such as this. Gretchen picked a flower such as that. She tried to read Faust’s love in the petals of the flower. Faust destroyed the flower with the power of his love for her.”
“I love a good allegory,” said Herr Oebeke.
“Quiet, you idiot,” said his uncle.
“Symbolism,” insisted the nephew.
“Precisely,” said Schumann, inspiring a smile of delight or perhaps of reprisal from Herr Oebeke.
“Not that Faust actually destroyed the flower,” Schumann conceded to Dr. Richarz. “He destroyed its meaning. And in so doing, of course, he destroyed its symbolism. As for my Faust, it was performed in three cities—Leipzig, Dresden, and Weimar—on the same day. It was the hundredth anniversary of Goethe’s birth. And all I wished was that I could have been like Faust himself for
that one day, everywhere at once, hearing everything there was to hear. I wonder if I would have recognized the music. It had been in my desk for five years. I had even forgotten I’d written it.”
“We often forget what most we love,” said Dr. Richarz.
“Symbolism,” accused Schumann.
“Thank you,” said Herr Oebeke.
“Idiot,” said his uncle.
“The magazine.” Schumann pointed.
“It’s not about Faust. It’s about you. It’s not about what you’ve produced. It’s about your life. Imagine, having such fame as you have that as far away as Boston, Massachusetts, your deeds are reported. Does that not in itself give you reason to live? That what you have created is considered of such importance that what you have done is reported to all the world?”
“Deeds? What deeds? What have I done?”
“This article is about your miraculous brush with death. About how you were saved from the river. But that’s not why I have brought it to your attention. I have brought it to your attention because it says …” Dr. Richarz opened Dwight’s and read, “‘The overexcitement of an active brain, always intensely occupied with the creation and execution of new musical creations was the true secret…’ So you see. There it is—just as you and I have been discussing.”
“The true secret of what?” Schumann reached for the magazine.
Dr. Richarz closed it hastily and put it behind his back with one hand while with the other he gestured for his nephew to move closer to his patient.
“The true secret of why you felt it necessary to enter the river in the first place.”
“Oh, they know about how I jumped in to retrieve my wedding ring?”