by J. D. Landis
Dr. Richarz seemed as confused as the rest of the world about Herr Brahms. Only she and her husband appeared to understand that Herr Brahms was no intruder between them but in fact the very mortar squeezed into the crack that had opened in their lives when Robert could no longer live at home and fled to Endenich. Johannes brought her more than news of Robert; he brought Robert himself, in his eyes and between his fingers and in the compassion of his grasp. And he took to Robert more of her than she could send in letters or any longer with her mind the way they once played music when apart and sent it to one another so it might join in the air in what she had come to realize, once Robert had truly joined himself to her, was quite a lovely facsimile of intercourse but a mere understudy in the actual role.
Even when she and Johannes had been apart, he would tell Robert they had been together. He had asked her not to be shocked at his brazen lying to her husband about seeing her when he had not. He believed, as he had written her in one of his countless letters when they actually were apart, that by telling Robert about her, and nothing but her, he could cause Robert to become filled with a longing to be hers again. He told her he would write to Robert about their summer trip together along the Rhine and describe it to him in such a way that he would be neither hurt nor distressed.
They had walked nearly a hundred miles, accompanied only by Berthe the maid, and she only because Johannes exaggerated Clara’s celebrity and told her there was a danger that whatever they did together would “get into the papers,” as he put it, and be regarded as improper. He was like her prudent friends in that, while she was confident enough in the strength of her love for her husband to know that her love for Johannes took nothing from that husband or anyone else, including the children, but gave them all whatever cheer there was to be gotten from her life. She had been gossiped about all her life and was aware when she performed in public that forms of gossip often took up the space of music in the minds of the people, who speculated to themselves about her clothes and her skin and her hair and those parts of her body and mind invisible to the eye and mind and the nature of her passion.
Berthe had her own bag, but she and Johannes lived out of his knapsack, which they emptied of their clothes in inns along the way and packed with food and drink for their hikes along the Lorelei cliff and up from the old gate of St. Goarshausen to the Katz Castle and into woods along the river in which they would stop for lunch and she would tell him the things that occupied her mind. As they drifted in a little flat-bottomed boat at the base of the Lorelei cliff, she held him so that if he heard the nymph sing to him, he would not, however tempted, be able to run to her. There in the tranquil valley, leaning against each other in the mass of rocks, they heard only the wind blowing lightly over grief and suffering, silencing them, there where the primrose dreamed.
Johannes himself dreamed of living with Clara and Robert and told her so at the same time he wrote that he wished to God he were allowed that day instead of writing this letter to tell her with his own lips that he was dying of love for her.
They are all dying of love. That’s what love does. Requited love is no less painful than love unreturned or even unacknowledged. The more deeply two beings bore into each other, the greater the pain, not from the penetration itself but from the wound it leaves.
Dr. Richarz would not understand. He sent her away “for the good of the children,” no longer concerned, it seemed, with what she might do to Robert or he to her. He’d given her up for lost now, lost to her husband, who had been lost to her.
But nine days later, he finally summoned her to Endenich itself, at such time as she could do no harm. The end was near, he said in his telegram. If she wished to see her husband before he died, come now.
And so she went, with Johannes, and saw Endenich for the first time. Saw Endenich but not her husband. He had improved since the telegram. Dr. Richarz apologized for the inconvenience, but he felt it best she not see him now. She was finally there, and she could not see him because he was getting better! It was only when Johannes emerged from Robert’s rooms and agreed with the doctor that she left. It would not, Johannes said, kill her beloved husband to see her, as she had feared everyone there thought. And while it would not kill her to see him, it would upset her terribly. Johannes alone had been allowed to see him. He had been, for some time, the only person allowed to see him. Johannes bore all the terror of that sight, for her, for the world, and whatever she saw of her husband she must see in him.
Before returning to Düsseldorf, they walked through the Endenich garden, profuse with flowers and insects and leafy shade in the summer heat. She was tired from the trip and from the preparation in her mind to see her husband and the terrible combination of disappointment and relief that she was not to see him. All she wanted to do was leave the garden path and lie down on the grass beneath a tree with Johannes—those two trees, she pointed out the very trees and told him the story of Philemon and Baucis as Robert had always told it to the children, Philemon and Baucis who were visited by Zeus and Hermes disguised as beggars and were the only human beings who gave them food and shelter and in return were offered by these gods anything they wanted, and they said what they wanted most was to die at the same time so they would never be apart, in life or death, and their wish was granted and they were turned into trees, two trees, side by side; like your mother and me, Robert told the children, never to be apart, because we are kind to strangers and we shall love each other eternally. Johannes did not lie down with her beneath those trees but led her instead back toward the main building and showed her Robert’s windows and then took her by the shoulders and turned her around so she might see what Robert saw from the other side of those windows, the river and the mountains and the arrows of the sun.
Four days after that, unsummoned by anyone but Robert himself, and by him silently, within her mind, she returned to Endenich. When she demanded one final reunion with him, and it was granted without hesitation by Dr. Richarz, she wished to flee and whispered to Johannes that perhaps so long as she did not see Robert, and he not see her, he would live. But Johannes told her that someday Robert would die, whether he saw her or not, and to die without seeing her would be to die without grace or salvation.
It is dusk when she enters his bedroom, candles lit and shadows from the half-drawn, wind-stroked drapes purling through the room and gathering her toward him. The others wait in the darker shadows by the door to his sitting room while she approaches him where he lies in bed, covered, clearly thin, almost nothing left of him but his face, which, as if he has been waiting for her all this time, since he’d been torn from her without so much as a farewell, smiles. He takes her to his eyes and smiles.
She is afraid to touch him. Afraid for both of them. But he raises a twitching, shaky arm, tangled in his sheet, until he frees it and motions for her to come closer and puts it around her as she bends to him. She cannot tell his trembing from her own. When she feels his arm weaken, she keeps it around her with her hand on his wrist, unwilling to surrender that embrace for all the treasure in the world. His breath washes across her face, uncorrupted, cleansed, and with her eyes on his she traces his features with the first finger of each hand and feels she is painting a picture of pain. Pulsing in the candlelight beside her face is the Laurens portrait of Johannes.
He tries to speak and does speak, but she cannot understand a word. He babbles, ever more loudly, until he becomes agitated and thrashes beneath the sheets. Dr. Richarz approaches and motions for the two men with him to do something to Robert, she can’t imagine what, but she waves them all away and withdraws herself but only so far as the foot of the bed, upon which she lies and from which she stares up at him, scarcely daring to breathe, waiting for the silence that finally comes, so that all she can hear is his breathing and the softening sounds he makes out of which she finally understands only this: “Clara.”
The next morning she and Johannes return early from the Star Family Hotel in Bonn and do not leave until dark. Most o
f the day they take turns looking through the window in his wall, as he lies on his bed twitching and tossing his head and ranting argumentatively and without satisfaction. Because she loves him so dearly, she prays for him to be released.
Only when she is permitted into the room and insists on feeding him does he calm down. She dips her fingers repeatedly into a jar of cold calves’-foot jelly, which, as it warms upon her fingers and in the breath she breathes upon it, reminds her of the warmth that spread from him to her, from man to woman, as they passed the nights of marriage. He sucks it off each time as if he’s not eaten since last they were together at their table at home. His mouth is warm inside, his eyes ecstatic.
The day after that, July 29, Tuesday, at four in the afternoon, while she and Johannes are at the train station in Bonn to pick up Joseph Joachim so he too may be there at the end, Robert dies. A half hour later, a half hour too late, she kneels beside his bed and feels a magnificent spirit hover above her and fly off, too soon for her to be taken along.
Johannes brings her flowers from the Endenich garden. She lays them on her husband’s head. As for her love, he has taken it with him.
Epilogue
Where are our lovers, our girls? They are in their tomb.
Gérard de Nerval
There were more people buried in the tiny churchyard of Bonn’s Alter Friedhof than attended Schumann’s funeral two days following his death. Joseph Joachim had indeed been on the train the time of whose arrival prevented Clara from being at her husband’s bedside when he died; he and Brahms walked before the coffin. Clara walked behind, as did Ferdinand Hiller, who had journeyed from Cologne and who, though he was separated by nearly sixty years from his renown as a child prodigy, Clara imagined in her mind as young as Johannes was now and making love to her rival Maria Moke in Berlioz’s apartment and pictured him watching her in Paris with her white dress flying high as she vaulted over Chopin. But what, she wondered, did he envision when he saw her now, thirty-seven years old with eight children torn from her belly and two more bled from between her legs and grief at war inside her with release?
Robert’s coffin was borne by even younger men than Brahms and Joachim, members of the Düsseldorf Concordia male choir, a few of whom had endured his distracted conducting and a few more of whom he would have found beautiful had he been alive to see them.
On what would have been Schumann’s forty-seventh birthday, a headstone was erected on his grave, as much the work of Brahms as the Beethoven monument had been that of Liszt and for this reason vastly more simple and obscure. It would be another twenty-five years before Schumann received a monument in his likeness on that site, so cold in its resemblance to him that Clara could not bear to look at it. At its unveiling, on May 2, 1880, Joachim played and Brahms conducted. Money had begun to be raised for the statue seven years earlier, at a concert where Brahms conducted and Clara played, described by her daughter Eugenie as looking like a young girl, a bride; when she finished, at least a hundred and fifty bouquets came flying at her.
Friedrich Wieck was sentenced to eighteen days in prison for what were taken to be his libelous accusations against his son-in-law, who of course went on to live a life that proved some of them to be accurate. By the time he died in 1873 at the age of eighty-eight, Wieck had reconciled with Clara and felt safe, with her husband long dead, in leaving her a small fortune, his pride at this bequest unpricked by any sense that this money had been hers to begin with.
A statue of Felix Mendelssohn was sculpted by Erwin Stein and placed before the Gewandhaus in Leipzig in 1892. There it stood until November 10, 1936. On that date, Sir Thomas Beecham arrived in Leipzig with his London Philharmonic Orchestra and requested of the city’s mayor, Karl Goerderler, permission to place a wreath upon the statue. Goerderler said such a gesture would honor both the city of Leipzig and the memory of Mendelssohn. But the statue was not to be found in its place before the Gewandhaus. It had the night before been taken away and smashed to pieces. This was done under directive from the government in Berlin, which had demanded the destruction of the “monument to the one-hundred-percent Jew” (so much for the asylum of conversion) in order, in the words of the Leipziger Tageszeitung, “to exterminate the damage done to our cultural heritage by Judaism.” So embarrassed was Mayor Goerderler by the confusion caused the delegates of the London Philharmonic, not to mention the shame to his city, that he eventually joined the 1944 plot against Adolf Hitler, for which he was executed in 1945.
Mendelssohn, on pedestal, had lasted longer than Heine, on paper. All Heine’s writings were burned countrywide in festively public autos-da-fé in March 1933. Because he had written in “Almansor,” “where books are burned, they end up burning people,” there were Germans after the war who blamed Heine for the incinerator camps, arguing that prophecy is as much the cause as the forecasting of event and that had Heine not written such words, no Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, communists, vegetarians, nudists, pickpockets, herbalists, evangelists, mimes, stutterers, journalists, dentists, dwarves, or any other undesirables would have burned. Thus, because Heine himself had been a Jew (or why else would it have been necessary to burn his work?), it was a Jew who by his very prophecy had caused the holycost, whatever that was.
Heine, after nearly eight years lying on his mattress tomb, embraced his Judaism. Where he had once been, he said, a life-engulfing, pleasure-devouring Hellene who smiled condescendingly upon austere Nazarenes, he was now nothing more than a poor, doomed Jew, an emaciated image of anguish. Prophecy in the flesh.
The marches Schumann had written around the time of the 1849 revolution, including those for male chorus and military band, he had either never published or were so bad that even the Nazis couldn’t march to them. But there were parts of Paradise and the Peri so rousingly martial that they were played in the sacred service of patriotism and by coincidence were used to inspire German pilots on their way to bomb London, where Clara had sung in the Peri chorus as her husband lay dying in Endenich.
The large house in Zwickau at Number 2 Amtsgasse, to which the Schumann family moved in 1817, as much to gain space for August’s growing business as for the six children to run around in (particularly with Emilie spending more and more time alone in her room on the third floor), was destroyed in an Allied air raid in early 1945.
One of Felix Mendelssohn’s favorite quotations (Seneca’s Verum gaudium res severa est) was chiseled into the façade of the site of his greatest triumphs, the Leipzig Gewandhaus, and together with the rest of the building was reduced to incoherence by bombs in World War II. True enjoyment is serious business, say Seneca’s words, now dust in the cosmos.
In the dark of the night of February 13, 1945, Dresden was firebombed by the Allies and 80 percent of the city destroyed. Many of the Schumann family papers (letters, diaries, etc.) were ruined, not by fire but by water meant to extinguish the fire. Their content, however, had been preserved on microfilm in 1938, and survives.
Endenich, the suburb, became incorporated into the city of Bonn as Bonn expanded. Endenich, the insane asylum, was hit by bombs during the aforementioned war. There were still small pieces of Robert Schumann lying here and there.
But not his head. It, together with the rest of his body, had been opened by Dr. Richarz on the day after Schumann’s death, for the purpose of autopsy. This autopsy achieved no definitive explanation for the physical deterioration and eventual death of Robert Schumann, which has resulted in numerous posthumous explanations: hypertension; pneumonia; Osteitis Deformans (Paget’s disease); meningitis; pituitary apoplexy; syphilis; Korsakoff’s encephalopathy; a manic-depression so powerful it might have eaten away at Schumann’s brain, which was found to be considerably atrophied and to weigh approximately seven ounces less than was normal in a male of his years; cumulative concussive marasmus as a consequence of repeated drunken gravitations; self-starvation; overwork.
It was the last that Dr. Richarz determined was the cause of what he could only vaguely name the pro
gressive organic disease that claimed his patient’s life. In short, he concluded, Schumann was killed by his music.
So frustrated were later Schumann votaries (death and time, in their sneering complicity, drew to his music people the likes of whom it had repelled in his lifetime) at not knowing why he had left them for no apparent reason at so reasonably young an age (and with so accomplished a wife; with so many charming children, few of them able to remember him) that they dug up his head.
Actually, they exhumed all of him, but appropriated only the head. It was examined in 1885 by Professor Hermann Schaafhausen, a medical anthropologist, who declared on the basis of his examination of the skull (everything packed back into the skull after the 1856 autopsy had by that time dematerialized, to put a kindly term upon it) that it was normal. How it might have compared with Haydn’s and Mozart’s and Beethoven’s was left unstudied.
Yet so rare was this head (unless it was merely inconsequential) that it was never returned to its body in the tiny churchyard of Bonn’s Alter Friedhof and has been missing ever since.
Thus, when Clara was buried next to Robert on May 24, 1896, her eyes, could they see, would have seen through the wood and soil and leaves and bugs that her beloved husband, whose troubled, beautiful head she had cradled so often to her bosom, had no head and thus was not, in essence, her husband.
She had died of a stroke four days earlier. Johannes was vacationing in Ischl and rushed to be at her funeral. In his weary grief, he missed his connection in Attnang and rode endlessly in the wrong direction, spent an entire night in the Linz station, journeyed to Frankfurt, where she lived and he assumed she would be buried, only to discover that the funeral was in Bonn, where he arrived the next day in time to see the funeral procession moving away from him as if in perfect imitation of death.