by J. D. Landis
“You received this letter only tonight? Your powers of memorization are miraculous, Herr Schumann.”
“It means that she must love him more than I.” Schumann wept.
“Herr Nämlich! Herr Niemand!” called Dr. Richarz.
The attendants came and rescued Dr. Richarz.
*Schumann had several times visited Rethels in his Düsseldorf studio and had purchased woodcuts from both the This, Too, Is a Dance of Death and the Another Dance of Death series. His favorite was Death the Rider from the latter, dated 1849: Death is on a horse, carrying his scythe, as he approaches a walled city with two large church spires and smoke coming from two chimneys. He bought it because it reminded him how the horror of the revolution had rendered him exuberant with music. Alfred Rethels had been driven mad by having had to wait eight years for an official decision concerning whether the south windows in the Aachen town hall would be filled in to allow sufficient space for him to paint his commissioned frescoes of scenes from the life of Charlemagne. He was so unhinged by the delay that he was able to finish only four of eight; the rest were painted from his cartoons by one of his students. Soon after his conversation with Schumann in Endenich, he was released into the care of his mother and sister and died in Düsseldorf three years later.
Endenich
JANUARY 11, 1855
I should by rights put by my best melodies, ‘Really by Clara Schumann,’
for with only myself for inspiration nothing profound or beautiful can
possibly occur to me.
Johannes Brahms
The boy wore a plaid shawl. It was frayed at its edges as if he had sat upon every inch of its fringe and even while sitting fidgeted. It was held together upon his right shoulder by a safety pin, which became visible only when he moved his head and his long blond hair melted off the metal. His left shoulder had, upon his arrival, been occupied by his knapsack, which was as full to bursting as Schumann’s heart.
He was a boy. He was so young as almost not to exist. The gods did not age, and their beauty never faded.
He sprawled in the upholstered fauteuil, while Schumann paced before him, stopping only to stare down at him in disbelief. Almost a year since he had seen him last in Düsseldorf.
But it was not his first visit, Johannes was firm in declaring. He had come once before, at the end of the summer on his way back to Düsseldorf from a walking tour of Swabia (Heilbron, Ulm, Heidelberg…).
Heidelberg! When Schumann had been a student at Heidelberg, even younger than Johannes was now, he played the piano everywhere, he was quite a success, and one night when he was playing at a ball, a beautiful young Frenchwoman whose name he still remembered, Charlotte, came up to him at the piano and said something like Oh, Monsieur Schumann, si vous jouez, vous pouvez me mener où vous voulez.
Johannes laughed but then asked timidly in his high voice please for a translation. Oh, Herr Schumann, if you’ll play, you may have me any way you like. Well, not have me, exactly, more like take me, but, then, she was not referring to a trip to Saarbrücken.
Johannes did not find the German as amusing as the French.
On his way back to Düsseldorf from Swabia, he had been allowed by the doctors to view Robert only through a hole in his wall. He apologized; he had wanted to embrace his master.
Hole in the wall!
The boy blushed as if he had given up the secret of the cepionidus.
But Schumann immediately set him at his ease by confessing that he knew all about the hole in the wall. This was an insane asylum, after all, much as it resembled a valley chalet. People were being paid to look at him through a hole in the wall. Sometimes he looked through the hole in the wall himself. Not out. In. He always expected to see himself, as one was said to be able to see one’s image reflected in the cepionidus, and never did. This made him feel invulnerable to the spying of others.
Johannes, nonetheless, had seen him smoking his pipe.
Speaking of which, were there any cigars in that knapsack?
There were! Look at that thing—mightn’t they be crushed?
His beloved wife, Johannes told Schumann, had packed the cigars.
Indeed, they were not crushed.
They sat and smoked. Johannes chewed as much as sucked on his cigar, until its end was soaked with his saliva and was frayed and had him picking shreds of dark tobacco off his tongue and twirling them between his thumb and forefinger until they were dry enough to drop into the ashtray on the smoking stand. But the smoke from his cigar was fragrant with spice and an earth that could not be found in the gardens of Endenich, the way another’s cigar always smelled sweeter than one’s own, and Schumann pulled the smoke into him as he paced before the reclining Brahms, danced through the smoke the boy breathed out into the room that sheltered them.
He was living in a small apartment above her, still, yes, on Bilkerstrasse. His mother had advised him against it. Here was her letter. Was he wrong in what he had done: rushing to Düsseldorf at the first news of Robert’s illness, moving into the house, taking care of things?
What things?
Was he wrong? Johannes insisted upon knowing.
Schumann read the letter the boy had received from his mother. She was like all mothers, like his own mother, who had wanted him to go to law school, refusing to believe he could make a living with music. She was right! Even his father-in-law had been right!
Johannes’s mother wrote of him, “Schumann” (strange to read one’s name in someone’s letter, even when accustomed to reading it in reviews of his work, and to see himself as “Schumann” and not “the master,” which is what the letter’s recipient called him sometimes, or “Robert,” which is what he loved to be called by a young man twenty-five years his junior—it was a form of immortality!). She wrote of this Schumann that he had opened doors but that Johannes must expand his own possibilities. He could not live on his compositions—even the great masters had been unable to do that. She hoped he would have gotten a job if Schumann had not taken ill. On a temporary basis, it was allowable for him to help out. But he could not stay there forever. He was losing time. He was losing money. He might not like hearing it, but respect came only to men with money.
What was it with mothers? A genius emerged from the womb, and the mother feared he would suffer more from lack of funds than from the stifling of his art.
Schumann offered to burn her letter. He touched the tip of his cigar to its corner. But either his cigar had gone out or the letter was as indestructible as any mother’s admonition.
He hadn’t answered Johannes’s question: Was he wrong?
Of course he wasn’t wrong.
And Johannes hadn’t answered his question: What things? What did he do there all day? It was no longer for Schumann an enduring house, as neither was any of the other places he’d lived with Clara. Everything before his vision was cerebral, conceptual, frozen in the brain. What did he do there all day?
Johannes was in charge of all household expenses and kept track of everything in the household diary: mortgage payments, school tuition, servants’ wages, food, wine, medicines, piano tuning, postage stamps, firewood, coal. When the beloved wife had gone on tour four months after the birth of little Felix, he supervised the children’s studies and music lessons and helped out the housekeeper, Berthe, and the other servants in taking care of the youngest children, including Felix, who was small enough to sit in his hand and often did as he danced around the room to amuse the other children, so that Felix had learned to laugh heartily at a very early age, and the other children had learned something they ought not do with a mere infant. He gave the little ones sugarloaf to encourage them to learn the alphabet. He brought Ludwig to his bed when the child missed his mother and was afraid to fall asleep out of fear that Ludwig would need him and dreamed his dreams awake and when Ludwig awakened at dawn they wrestled and the little boy won. He taught Marie and Elise to play Pictures from the East for the beloved wife’s birthday, for which he had given h
er a four-hand arrangement of the master’s quintet. In return, for Christmas, she gave him the complete works of Jean Paul. And when Frau Schumann needed clothes sent to her in Ostend, Leipzig, Weimar, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Bremen, Breslau, Berlin, she asked him to search her bedroom for them and send them on. Sometimes he succeeded, and sometimes he failed. How did a woman arrange her clothes? What was the difference between a chemise and a blouse, between Hemden and Blusen? Why were some buttons buttoned and some not? Why was it more difficult to fold cotton than to write a sonata? What was the purpose of an undergarment that looked in a drawer to be no bigger than to fit an autumn gourd? When was a heel high and when was it merely pitched?
You are asking, Schumann said, the wrong person.
How can her husband be the wrong person?
Schumann had no answer.
Johannes was her husband.
This was a comfort, as well as an excitation, and a grief.
What did the boy make of the marriage diary, Schumann wondered, with its intimacies recorded, night after night, sometimes night after night after night, the cold mathematics of the most heated passion Schumann had known or could imagine? He took a virile pride in being measured by so young a man, if indeed Johannes read and understood the symbols of their fornications and varieties thereof, and he took into him a great sadness that it should be over, and he be replaced, not by this boy he loved but by his own absence. The only place he could be two places at once was within himself.
There was always music. Music, within, was as vagrant as love. But out in the world it was, like love, manifest and gladsome.
The beloved wife had been the first to perform Johannes’s work, the andante and scherzo from his third sonata, in F minor. In Leipzig. So she was with both of them the first to perform their work. And for each in Leipzig. And they had both written early sonatas in F-sharp minor, the boy’s a kind of homage to his master’s, perhaps a lonely cry of his own heart for someone he, too, loved.
In Weimar, with Liszt conducting the orchestra, she played the boy’s D-Minor Concerto. He had been writing it first as a sonata for two pianos, and Schumann remembered and reminded him of how he would sit and listen to Johannes and Clara play it together in the house on Bilkerstrasse and each time they began it, he, Schumann, would leap from his seat when Clara played the B-flat chord over the D-minor triad in the bass, and he would shout… he could not remember what he shouted, could not remember even whether what he shouted was in the form of words. He remembered only breathing something uncontrollably out of the confines of his being where he stored all his knowledge of music as well as that uncommon generosity that allowed an artist to hosanna his humiliation before superior genius. When he heard such chords as Johannes had written, logic fled the world, and in its place came the agitated serenity instilled by beauty.
Because even in the madhouse he received issues of his old magazine—the one in which he had introduced Johannes to the world, God help him!—Schumann had seen Liszt’s piece about Clara’s appearance in Weimar. Liszt wrote that she had once been a delightful plaything of the Muses (no doubt during their tryst in Vienna), which was a wonderful description of her as Schumann had known her, but that she had become a stern priestess who gazed at men with unhappy, penetrating eyes.
It was he, Schumann, who had caused her such sadness. He had been sick for years, and Clara had grown pinched within the crevice of his sufferings. But when Johannes had arrived… plaything of the Muses did not do justice to her delight. No little girl as he had known in Leipzig, enchanting and brilliant and provocative of visions of a whole life lived within her spell, should be stern, should be priestly. Little wonder he’d forgotten her for months and remembered her through remembering Johannes. He could not see one of them without seeing the other.
Johannes assured him he would continue to care for the beloved wife.
He then put down his cigar to play for him.
He played his variations on Schumann’s Bunte Blütter theme. As he played, and Schumann followed with the manuscript in his lap as finally he sat by taking Johannes’s place on the fauteuil and even smoked the boy’s discarded cigar, he heard Mendelssohn in the piece and Clara and himself, all put together for what would surely be forever by this boy, this angel, this master, who had written on the title page:
VARIATIONS FOR THE PIANO
ON A THEME BY ROBERT SCHUMANN
DEDICATED TO CLARA SCHUMANN
BY JOHANNES BRAHMS
Endenich
JANUARY 29, 1855
I am dying of love for you.
Johannes Brahms
Dr. Richarz, as was his custom, kept the patient’s file in his lap during any discussion. The presence of the file in so distinguished a precinct signaled to the patient conscious of such distinction that he or she was not going to be subject to the shame and inconvenience of such physical treatment as force-feeding, enema, pupillary scrutinization, or the measuring of the cranium, and instead was expected to approach madness autocathartically.
“What is it you are asking?” asked Schumann. He was on his bed but not in it. He had been dozing. He was wearing his usual suit, though when he napped he loosened his cravat. This was his signal to his doctors and attendants that he was not dead.
“A bit of medical history.” Dr. Richarz tapped the file. “I need you to fill in the blanks.”
Schumann tapped his head. “I need you to fill in the blanks.”
“The mind has no blanks, Herr Schumann. It is never empty; always full. Sometimes too full. Anxiety manifests itself in the body, and in behavior, but it enters the body from the mind. When the mind can no longer contain itself, it bursts into the body. It insinuates itself into the flesh. It causes such symptoms as you have suffered over the years. The trembling, the itching, the cold feet, the insomnia, the indigestion, the weeping, the screaming, the drinking, the—”
“I hope you’re not going to say ‘smoking.’”
“Of course not.”
“And yet you do not smoke yourself.”
“Oh, I would love to. But it makes me sick.”
“Have a cigar.”
Dr. Richarz declined. Schumann lit his own.
“What is it you’re really after?”
“The true secret.”
“Of why I went for my swim?”
“Much more than that. I want to know why you’re here.”
“I’m here because I went for my swim?”
“You’re here because you’re ill. But I don’t know what you’re ill with.”
“You know perfectly well what I’m ill with! Surely you’re not as nosologically deficient as that. What you don’t know is why I remain ill.”
“I am, I can assure you, a nosologist not to be trifled with. Which is precisely why I can say that you would not remain ill if I knew what you were ill with.”
“You have a cure for everything?”
“I have a cure for what I know I can cure.”
“Mind or body?”
“I hate that question.”
“And I hate enemas.”
“I’m not asking you to have an enema, Herr Schumann!”
“Wrong!”
“I merely want your history. All of it.”
“All of it?”
“So I may plot the trajectory of your suffering.”
“Down.” Yet Schumann seemed so delighted with this answer that he pointed his cigar straight up.
“Were you never happy?”
“I was always happy.”
“And your misery? Your—?”
“What do you think, doctor, we are vessels filled at one moment with joy and the next with despair? I was always happy. Who would not be?—with music and so many children and a wife like mine, who made desire seem a sacrament. And I was always wretched, aware of great dis-ease within myself, for the same reasons—music, children, woman. I feared to lose them. And look at me—I have!”
“Why do you proclaim this with such glee, Herr Schum
ann?”
“Glee? You’re right! There it is! My point exactly!”
“But what caused this confusion in yourself?”
Schumann sat up in his bed, leaning toward Dr. Richarz. “What a fine way to state it. This confusion in myself. You are not saying I’m confused; only that I contain confusion.”
Dr. Richarz did not respond. The long ash on Schumann’s cigar fell between his legs onto the bed; he scooped it carefully from one hand into the other and deposited it whole into the ashtray that sat beneath the portrait of Johannes Brahms on his night table.
Endenich
FEBRUARY 23, 1855
I can no longer love an unmarried girl.
Johannes Brahms
“You look like young Werther.”
Brahms had been admitted to Schumann’s sitting room and was approaching the master with an inkstand under one arm and a box of cigars and a painting under the other. He wore yellow pants, a blue jacket, and high boots.
“All the fashion,” said Brahms.
“Eighty years ago!”
“Well, what kind of fool would want to wear the fashion of his own time!”
“A fashionable one?”
Brahms blushed unashamedly.
“I had a Werther love once,” Schumann said, reaching for the box of cigars. “Agnes Carus was my Lotte. In Colditz. Her husband was one of my doctors. Yet it never occurred to me she was married. Her husband was a prop in the play of my life. I merely had to watch out not to knock into him in my haste to get to her. Not that I ever did. Get to her, that is. By the time she offered herself to me, I was in love with someone else.”
Brahms proffered the painting, around which was wrapped the shawl he would have worn had he not been dressed as the quintessential unrequited lover.