Symphony of Seduction

by Christopher Lawrence

  ‘We can’t talk now,’ she said. ‘It is late. I am showing you out. This is my father’s house.’ She was aware of how little time was left before Wieck would come looking for her.

  ‘So it begins,’ he said, stepping out over the threshold. He was hot and trembling despite being her elder by some nine years with experience in matters such as this, while Clara’s hands were steady and her brow dry after her near swoon. The cold November air would be a tonic. He had to consider what should come after a kiss on the stairs.

  The gusting autumn leaves in Leipzig’s cobbled streets matched the commotion of Schumann’s thoughts. There were the aftershocks of that kiss. Clara had been a part of his life ever since her childhood; what had just happened redefined them both. He would try to diminish its sensuality if he could, and instead dwell on the poetry of the moment. As always with Robert, with poetry came the music.

  His mind surged with the notes he had put to paper that afternoon. Carnaval was about a gallery of people he loved and admired, mingling at a fantastical masked ball with an unruly troupe of commedia dell’arte characters. His own Florestan and Eusebius rubbed shoulders with Pierrot and Harlequin; Clara was there in a minor-key waltz called Chiarina. Next to her was Chopin, about whom Robert had declared in an ecstatic review: ‘Hats off, gentlemen! A genius!’ He wondered if the day would come when someone might say that about himself.

  Time wasn’t exactly on his side if he was going to do something remarkable with his life. First he had been going to be a lawyer, if only to please his mother. Then he was going to be a pianist, until the homemade gadget he contrived from a cigar box to make his fingers stronger had precisely the opposite effect. It yanked one finger at a time back towards the wrist while the others were in use, but when he released the middle finger of his right hand after a strenuous practice session he discovered the bloody thing wouldn’t work any more.

  Short-lived as this ambition proved to be, it at least had led him to Clara. She was only eight when they met, when her father, Friedrich, agreed to teach piano to the teenage university law student. Even then her precocity at the piano was extraordinary. She was already preparing for her first major concert appearance while Robert morosely picked away at his scales, smoking one cigar after another.

  With the child Clara he felt complicity based on a shared love of music. They pored over scores together and took long walks, during which she teased him by tugging the back of his coat, her laughter tinkling in the air.

  She was about to begin her first major European tour at thirteen when she met Schumann’s mother, who playfully (and perhaps intuitively) joked that someday Clara should marry ‘my Robert’. Clara blushed, but Robert didn’t see it quite that way. They were not a boyfriend and girlfriend, he declared, or even a brother and sister: he was a ‘pilgrim’, and she the ‘distant shrine’.

  Meanwhile, the pilgrim made regular visits to another place of worship between the legs of Christel, who couldn’t play the piano at all. Her appetite for sex was exceeded only by Robert’s capacity for post-coital guilt. Since he visited her several times a week, he felt guilty much of the time, and catching syphilis from the damned woman didn’t help. At least he had taken the arsenic cure as soon as he noticed the sores, and both they and, presumably, the disease, had cleared. If only he could also eradicate his desires! They tainted what should have been the pure nature of the great creative artist.

  ‘I am sinking back into the old slime!’ he lamented. ‘Will no hand come from the clouds to hold me back? I must become that hand!’

  ‘Oh Robbie, such theatrics,’ Christel replied with a half-lidded gaze over the rim of her naked breast. ‘Let me give you a hand.’ Then she grasped the architect of his despair.

  There was that night – he remembered it was during October in 1833 – when he thought he was losing his mind, just like some of the poets he admired. Loneliness and a pervading sense of failure froze him into something ‘hardly more than a statue’. Standing at his fourth-floor window and watching the shattered moonlight on the stones of the courtyard below, he resolved to kill himself. Somehow he made it through to the morning. Soon after, he visited a doctor, hoping there might be some remedy.

  ‘Medicine won’t be any help to you, Herr Schumann. You need to find yourself a wife. She will soon cure you.’

  The music of Carnaval fell back into his mind, and the next piece in the sequence after the homage to Chopin: Estrella, his poetic nickname for Ernestine, another of Wieck’s piano students. Oh God, what was he going to do?

  Taking the doctor’s advice, he had quickly developed what he thought to be a romance with Ernestine. He saw her as delicate, while she was attracted to the way he pursed his lips, his thoughtful silences and the way his brown hair tumbled over his forehead. Her father was a baron, her mother a countess, and there was little chance they would countenance their daughter living in a composer’s garret – meaning that superior accommodation might be provided.

  Robert didn’t behave with Ernestine the way he did with Christel. Instead, they gazed at each other significantly, spoke of the moral purity of every great creative artist and refrained from even holding each other’s hand. He dedicated an allegro to her. The platonic lovers were soon engaged, and it seemed as if all Robert’s problems and temptations were conquered. He even moved to lodgings on the ground floor.

  But then Ernestine proved not to be as aristocratic as he thought. A year after their engagement, he discovered she was not the daughter of a baron. Instead, she was the illegitimate progeny of a baron’s wife’s sister and a man unknown; probably the redheaded stablehand with the nice thighs. Robert could hold Ernestine’s hand as passionately as he liked, but he would never find any gold coins clasped in it.

  Meanwhile, Clara returned from yet another European tour in the company of her svengali father. She had changed into a woman of the world, a true sophisticate, and she looked at him in a different way.

  Her shrine was no longer distant.

  The music in Robert’s head stopped. Now he sensed only the cold as the night of an approaching winter closed in. Shivering, he clasped the thick collar of his coat. His body heat was drained like fuel by the process of recollection. All that remained was the imprint of warmth on his lips. That kiss …

  This much was clear: he must break with Ernestine. What he had said to Clara on her father’s doorstep was true. Something had begun. He and Clara were perfectly suited to one another, were destined to be together, and would inspire each other. She would be the supreme interpreter of all the great music that he would now compose for her. In her hands, the qualities in his works that many had found inscrutable – brevity, formlessness, secret codes, literary allusions – would make perfect sense. And no one would be more delighted by this outcome than Clara’s father, who had made it his sole purpose to prepare his gifted daughter for a life in the service of Art.

  The street had grown quiet now, excepting the distant murmur of a corner tavern where Robert intended to go for a beer to massage his thoughts. It was easy to distinguish the footsteps that approached him rapidly from behind.

  Somebody is in as much of a hurry to get to that tavern as I am, he thought.

  ‘Schumann!’ A hand grasped his shoulder, spinning him around.

  He looked into the red face of Friedrich Wieck, breathless from the pursuit. His glaring eyes made an odd contrast to his otherwise insipid features and the foppish cut of his hair that now lay in damp strands across his forehead.

  ‘Herr Wieck, I feel there is something I should speak with you about …’ began Schumann.

  ‘I know what is going on!’ whispered Wieck, exhaling huge clouds of mist in the air. ‘You and my Clara!’

  ‘That’s what we must discuss —’ said Schumann, attempting to continue his first interrupted sentence.

  ‘We will discuss nothing!’ said Wieck, again cutting him off.

  He stepped forward and seized the front of Schumann’s coat. Robert recalled seeing Wie
ck doing the same with Clara’s brother Alwin when he’d played badly in one of his father’s piano lessons. That time, the boy had been thrown to the floor.

  ‘I will make this simple so that you understand, Herr Schumann,’ Wieck said slowly, his mouth snarling inches from Robert’s face. ‘If I see you in my house again, if I see you anywhere attempting to speak to my daughter – I will shoot you.’

  Wieck pushed Robert away and turned in the direction of his house, where a sobbing Clara waited behind a locked bedroom door. Schumann watched the retreating figure and then turned in the direction of the tavern, walking now with more speed than before.

  ‘He’s not going to shoot you,’ said Clara, stroking his hair, teasing it around her tapered fingers. ‘He would lose everything: his reputation, me, and the money I will make.’

  It was three months later, and the couple were in Dresden. Clara had gone there with her father, who had then to return to Leipzig unexpectedly on business. Robert seized the opportunity to enjoy Clara’s lips for three days by making his pilgrimage to the neighbouring city. Unchaperoned as they were, Clara was not Christel, and her shrine remained unsullied.

  He had severed his engagement with Ernestine, each returning their ring to the other. She showed more maturity and understanding than he could see in himself. ‘I always thought you could only love Clara,’ she said.

  Robert cupped Clara’s face with his good hand. ‘I’m beginning to feel that your father would do it just for the satisfaction of knowing you’d be tainted goods,’ he said. ‘If he can’t have you, nobody can.’

  ‘He’s behaving like a feudal lord because I’m not yet of age,’ she said, ‘but he’s a lord trying to control a revolution; a revolution called Love. Music is my life, and since you are music, then you will become my life. The best my father can do is try to keep us apart – and he hasn’t done very well at it this time.’

  Robert did not see or speak with her again for another eighteen months.

  Clara’s father learned of the clandestine liaison in Dresden and had turned the Leipzig house into a fortress. Schumann was officially expunged from her past by Wieck’s insistence that she return all of the composer’s letters while asking him in turn to return hers.

  Robert sought his familiar consolations: drink, and the accepting warmth of Christel. She had given him the pox years before and could hardly infect him again. This time her embraces were without risk.

  ‘Pregnant?’ he said, incredulous.

  ‘If you bob into the barrel enough times, my love, you eventually get an apple,’ she said.

  A daughter was born early the following year. ‘Consequences,’ he noted in his diary. That was all.

  His landlady had another nasty surprise.

  ‘Out?’ he repeated, again incredulous.

  ‘I’m sorry, Herr Schumann,’ she said. ‘I’ve been very fond of you for a long time, but I won’t tolerate your behaviour any longer. The other tenants are complaining about the noise you make with your friends, and it’s not proper for those women to keep coming and going at all hours. This is a respectable house.’

  His music was going nowhere. Publishers were turning a cold shoulder. There were few performances with even fewer reviews. And yet the further he tried to push Clara’s face from his mind, the more music came rushing in.

  His landlady let him stay, and his days became a frenzy of scribbling as hundreds of pages began to mount up on his piano lid. He had felt enslaved at times by indulging his desires; now, to want and not to have was liberating at least a part of him: the part of greatest originality.

  The public wanted the glamour and tinsel of Liszt and Paganini, the cascades of notes, the bravado, the circus tricks of virtuosity. The academics wanted a seriousness of purpose that came with large forms, elaborate structures, cities of sound.

  Schumann knew that neither was his way. His first attempt at a symphony had been a disaster. In speech, just as on manuscript paper, he was not a gusher; prolixity had no place in his musical lexicon. Since ideas sped by in his mind he felt their expression should be equally swift. He knew that such discretion was not the fashion, but hoped the public would eventually come to prefer the whispered aside to the endless peroration. Nothing said more than a succinct ‘I love you’.

  He kept that in mind while composing Träumerei (or Dreaming) in his Scenes from Childhood, inspired by Clara’s observation that at times he seemed like a child; not infantile, but simple in his response to things. All of his music was for her, full of things that would pass by unnoticed in a concert hall. He knew it would bring her to tears if they could only exchange it with each other away from the world.

  One day an intermediary arrived with requests from Clara: could she have back his letters to her? And would he come in a couple of days to a concert in which she was playing some of his Symphonic Etudes?

  He went, she played, and the world exploded. He asked the question.

  ‘One yes is all you want, my darling?’ she said. ‘What an important little word it is! I can indeed say it. Yes. My inmost soul whispers it to you.’

  ‘You will be of age in a few weeks,’ said Robert. ‘On that day I can and I will ask your father for your hand.’

  ‘Surely God won’t turn my eighteenth birthday into a day of trouble? He couldn’t be that cruel,’ said Clara.

  ‘My life is torn up at the roots,’ said Robert. ‘The interview with your father was terrible. His is a new way to kill. He drives in the hilt as well as the blade.’

  Schumann looked exhausted when they met secretly in the house of one of his friends. After spending so much time alone in thought, he seemed to have physically disappeared into himself, eyes sinking beneath a puffy face. Even his hair was lifeless, pasted onto his head like an ill-fitting toupée.

  ‘I expected to confront a volcano, and instead found a glacier,’ he continued. ‘He was cold – cold. His answer was a perplexing mixture of refusal and consent, a path of torture to the altar without dismissing the idea of marriage completely. We’re to wait two more years, meet only in public during that time, and have no correspondence unless you are travelling. In the meantime, I am to amass a fortune big enough for you to be kept in the manner in which he feels you should be accustomed. Oh yes – he would also like me to fly to the moon. He wants to auction you off to the highest bidder, like any good businessman. He actually said to me, “Hearts? What do I care about hearts?”’

  ‘It’s the money he’s worried about, Robert. You admit that your brothers are still extending loans to help you get by. My father thinks you won’t be able to support me. If marriage curtails my career I won’t be able to support us either. He didn’t raise me to be a hausfrau. I have promised him to pursue my art for some years yet. It’s what I also want for myself. Next month my father and I are leaving for a tour to Vienna. We could be away for a while.’

  ‘How long is a while?’

  ‘Seven months.’

  ‘Seven months? We’ve only just seen each other again after being apart for eighteen months! We’re doomed to spend our best years apart! How can we …?’

  ‘It will be difficult. We can write. Don’t doubt me, darling Robert. If you hear reports about me, whatever they are, keep saying to yourself: She does it all for me. If you waver in this, you’ll break my heart. It is steadfast and unchanging, but it is not indestructible. I have heard reports about you too, you know.’

  And away Clara went to even greater successes. In Vienna she was named the Royal and Imperial Chamber Virtuoso and showered with acclaim. Wieck, seeing her market value going through the roof, did all he could to corrode the prospect of marriage to Schumann. Clara, still just eighteen and susceptible to her father’s will, began to echo his objections to Robert in her letters.

  He realised he was fighting a battle on several fronts, and used his letters to keep his physical presence alive to her memory. ‘I never leave you, but follow everywhere unseen,’ he wrote. ‘The figure fades away, but love and fait
h are unchanging.’ On New Year’s Eve, he reached to her in his solitude: ‘Let us kneel together, Clara, so close that I can touch you in this solemn hour.’

  Robert assessed his likely income and declared he was not far short of Wieck’s stipulations. In response, he received a letter from the older man that tightened the noose: ‘If I have to marry my daughter without delay to someone else, you will only have yourself to thank.’

  Two further years went by.

  Robert and Clara saw practically nothing of each other as they followed individual trajectories in the hope of swaying her father’s escalating objections.

  There were a few months of secret meetings that took place after Clara’s return from Vienna, despite her father’s vigilance. In the meantime, Wieck contacted Ernestine von Fricken in the hope of extracting some gossip about her old fiancé.

  ‘Your old man is trying to get the dirt on me,’ railed Robert. Thank God, he thought, Wieck had not managed to track down Christel.

  For a while the lovers relocated to the opposite corners of Europe: Robert to Vienna, where he hoped to become a publishing tycoon with the music review magazine he’d established years before and perhaps make a home for the eventual Schumann household; and Clara to Paris, without the company of her father this time, to try to become a lioness of its concert halls and salons. Again, the romance was maintained through correspondence: poems and affirmations, disputes and sweet making-up flying across the Continent in fast carriages.

  Both hated where they found themselves. Clara was becoming exhausted by Friedrich’s oscillations: in one letter he would declare she had been disinherited, in the next he wanted her to visit him. Robert deplored the Viennese; ‘they are afraid of everything new!’ he said. This was no place to pursue a business venture, especially when deep down he didn’t want to be a businessman.

  The endless machinations had become too absurd. Still apart, and with Clara’s twentieth birthday approaching, the two decided to make one last appeal to Wieck.