Symphony of Seduction

by Christopher Lawrence

  Days later, Robert visited an attorney back in Leipzig.

  ‘This has gone far enough with Herr Wieck!’

  ‘And good morning to you, Mr Schumann,’ said Herr Einert.

  ‘We have spent years trying to winkle a consent out of him for his daughter and me to marry. Finally, he has said yes.’

  ‘That is good news.’

  ‘It is not. His conditions are as follows: we cannot live here while he is alive, that he keeps all of Clara’s concert earnings for five more years, that he appoints someone to audit my financial affairs, and that Clara receives no inheritance. He wants us to sign an agreement to all this.’

  ‘Well, it does sound a little draconian.’

  ‘You are being too kind. So, I wrote to him again to try to bring our negotiations down to a realistic level. In reply, he sent his second wife around to my lodgings to tell me there would be no further discussion.’

  ‘Which brings you to my door, I presume.’

  ‘That is indeed why I am here. We have to take this bastard to court.’

  Six months later, the local Court of Appeal met – again.

  ‘This is the second meeting of the Court, and the third time we have considered this matter,’ said the convenor. ‘Herr Wieck, it is most helpful that you have deigned to appear before the Court on this occasion.’

  Wieck stood up, looking unexpectedly nervous.

  ‘I am here only because my daughter cannot see her way to agreeing with my latest and more accommodating conditions for approving her marriage to Herr Schumann,’ he said.

  ‘Given that you have barred her from your home, that may have been difficult,’ said Einert.

  ‘Of course I have! She is a fallen, wicked, abominable girl.’ He spat the words in Clara’s direction.

  ‘May the Court hear these new conditions?’

  ‘Certainly,’ said Wieck. ‘I request that she purchase all her belongings and piano from me, reimburse me the cost of my tuition from her childhood to now, pass on to her brothers her lifetime concert earnings, and have 8,000 thalers settled upon her by Herr Schumann in the likely event of their separation.’

  ‘Most accommodating,’ said Einert, drily. ‘And why do you consider a separation is likely?’

  ‘It is a question of Herr Schumann’s character,’ replied Wieck, his voice rising slightly. ‘I would like to bring his deficiencies to the attention of the Court.’

  ‘You are pressing charges? And these would be …?’

  ‘I accuse Schumann of being a bad composer. He has poor handwriting, his speech is often incomprehensible, he lies about his income and would have to be supported by my daughter. Finally, he is a drunkard.’

  Schumann rose to his feet spluttering, his face flushing at what was clearly an inconvenient time.

  ‘I’m sorry, Herr Schumann? We didn’t quite catch that,’ said the presiding judge.

  ‘This is … slander!’ Schumann’s tone was surprisingly soft for somebody about to explode. Next to him, Clara’s pale face tilted to one side, her eyes tinged with red. She was exhausted, and had fainted with stress before a concert appearance just days earlier when leaflets containing Wieck’s description of Schumann were distributed to the audience.

  ‘That is for the Court to decide,’ said the judge. ‘In the meantime, we will dismiss all of Herr Wieck’s accusations – save that of drunkenness, which is a very serious charge. We will require proof, Herr Wieck.’

  ‘Give me some time, and I will provide it,’ Wieck said. His voice did not ring with confidence.

  Schumann sat down shaking, again at an awkward moment. Sure, he liked a few glasses – but a drunkard? The music he was working on could not come from disordered thoughts, especially the Arabeske, which had so much of Clara’s grace in it. And things were beginning to look up as far as his career was concerned; Franz Liszt just played part of the Carnaval in a recital. He began to think of who among his friends might testify to his sobriety. Mendelssohn came to mind.

  Wieck glared at him as they passed while leaving the courtroom.

  ‘I know how you live, Herr Schumann,’ he hissed. ‘And now the world will know. What there is of your career will be ruined – my daughter’s also.’

  Clara gripped Robert’s arm, resolving to keep her tears to herself until she had returned to her mother, who had divorced Wieck years before.

  ‘Do you think we shall be married in May?’ she asked. ‘It’s only four months away.’

  ‘Nothing can stop us now, my beautiful Clara,’ said Robert.

  Spring came and went, and still Wieck had not been able to provide the courts with the evidence to back his claims against Schumann. Incredibly, they gave him more and more time.

  Meanwhile, Robert’s head was brimming with ideas. Writing just for the keyboard was becoming too confining; he wanted to crush his piano. Nowadays, when he dreamed of the life that lay ahead, he felt a song coming on. Could a run at a symphony be far behind?

  Finally, when the benign heat of a Saxon summer forced him to open his shirt collars while he worked, Schumann received the good news: Wieck had withdrawn his charges for want of hard evidence. It would be only a matter of time before the Court upheld their appeal. They had won – but they had also lost valuable time to be with each other.

  At least it was not time wasted. Schumann knew that his musical powers had increased through hard work. He had progressed from a handful of works to his Opus 22, with two sonatas, the Carnaval, Scenes from Childhood, Kreisleriana, the Novelletten and the Symphonic Etudes among them. His imagination had been pushed in unexpected directions by the emotional tribulations Wieck had forced upon him. What had been better for his work – love, or the attempt to stamp it out?

  He knew of creative artists for whom love was just a distraction, something that impeded their work. Those who had spent their lives without it were hardly uncreative: look at Beethoven. Well, thought Schumann, I’ve swallowed the bitter pill of hopeless love for almost five years. In a few weeks I’m going to see what changes a consummated love will bring.

  When Robert and Clara married on 12 September 1840 at ten o’clock in the morning in a little church just outside Leipzig, the sun shone for the first time in many days. He remembered the lamplight that had illuminated their first kiss all those years before.

  ‘This is the most beautiful day of my life,’ she said.

  Robert looked into her dark blue eyes and spoke as softly as always.

  ‘Darling, we will play and bring joy to the world like angels.’

  POSTSCRIPT

  Robert and Clara were together for nearly fourteen years and had a family of eight children. He eventually made his name as a composer, while Clara struggled between pregnancies to maintain her reputation as one of Europe’s greatest pianists.

  In February of 1854 Robert talked of terrifying music playing constantly in his head, robbing him of sleep and threatening to drive him mad. On 27 February he left his house in a floral dressing gown and attempted suicide by throwing himself into the Rhine. At his own insistence he was taken to an asylum in Endenich. His young protégé Johannes Brahms moved into the Schumann household to help look after the children, where he promptly fell in love with Clara.

  Schumann remained in care for the rest of his life. During that time Clara saw him only once, the day before he died on 29 July 1856, aged only forty-six. She outlived him by another forty years.

  Present-day medical opinion suggests that the cause of Schumann’s death was tertiary syphilis.

  THE RETURN TO LIFE

  Love, sex, delirium and a lust for revenge combined into a Romantic nightmare for French composer Hector Berlioz. A year after his futile infatuation for the Irish actress Harriet Smithson became the subject of the Fantastic Symphony, a betrayal by his new fiancée led to actions stranger than anything he could put into his music: a cross-dressing suicide mission across Europe with a Parisian bloodbath as the intended finale.

  ‘I am getting on. No mor
e rage, no more revenge, no more trembling, gnashing of teeth, no more hell in fact!’

  Hector Berlioz (1803–1869) in a letter to his friend Humbert Ferrand, 10–11 May 1831

  APRIL 1831

  Bells rang the Angelus across Florence as the composer tore open the letter in the poste restante office, unable to wait until returning to his hotel.

  Already dishevelled from weeks of sleepless nights, he managed to become even more so within the duration of several paragraphs, tears starting from his eyes, his left hand stabbing a memorable shock of red hair.

  ‘My dear Monsieur Berlioz …’ the letter began – not even from her, but from her mother, the person he thought soon to be his mother-in-law.

  The salutation rang hollow at once. He was nobody’s ‘dear’; not when someone other than the person he loved wrote such a letter.

  ‘… Camille is to be married immediately to Monsieur Pleyel, a union to which I have given my full consent. You must remember that I never formally agreed to your planned union with my daughter, so there can be no question of a breach of promise …’

  His hands trembled, almost tearing the letter apart.

  ‘… Nevertheless, we appreciate this news will come as something of a shock to you. It is Camille’s deepest wish that you may accept our decision in the nobility of spirit with which we believe you to be so richly endowed, rather than capitulating to more base emotions. Above all, we implore you not to consider anything by way of response that might endanger your personal safety or bring grief and humiliation to your family.’

  Madame Moke was telling him not to kill himself.

  Berlioz folded the letter. He was crying with rage and wanted to be sick, more from the realisation of a long-held suspicion than from genuine surprise. It was clear to him now just why Camille’s mother had urged him to leave both Paris and his fiancée as quickly as possible after his victory in the Rome Prize; why her demeanour towards him had changed noticeably in the weeks before his coach started out on the long southern trip; why she insisted that the engagement needed to last as long as it might take for him to have his music make some serious money.

  She had already found somebody with bigger pockets than his to be a son-in-law and wanted Berlioz out of the way before delivering this miserable coup de grâce.

  What a duplicitous bitch, he thought. They could all go hang as far as he was concerned. He snorted, and a woman nearby whispered to her young daughter not to stare at the stranger.

  Then the idea struck.

  What to do next was so obvious, so clear, that he rushed into the street, his face a deathly white.

  ‘Hector!’ called a familiar voice. It was his architect friend Schlick. Berlioz slowed his pace and turned around.

  ‘You’ve collected the mail ahead of me today … my dear man, you look appalling!’ Schlick said with sudden concern.

  ‘Read this,’ said Berlioz, handing him the letter.

  Schlick studied its contents with mounting apprehension. He knew how much his mercurial friend adored the young woman whom he dubbed his ‘Ariel’. To have a Shakespearean persona conferred on one was to occupy the highest position in Berlioz’s pantheon; before this ‘Ariel’ there had been an unhappy attachment to an ‘Ophelia’ and he’d written music about both of them. The score of Ophelia’s Symphonie fantastique (or Fantastic Symphony) was still being revised back in his hotel room.

  ‘Hector, this is monstrous,’ said Schlick. ‘Think clearly before you keep rushing about like this.’

  ‘I’ve already left Rome and put my competition stipend at risk,’ said Berlioz. ‘It was sending me mad, the absence of any news from Paris since I came to Italy. The only way to get to the bottom of the mystery was to quit the Academy and head back. And now, voilà!’ – he took the letter back from Schlick – ‘It has been solved.’

  ‘What happens now – back to Rome?’

  ‘Right now I need some consolation, a place where I can try to get over this. My family live not far from Grenoble; if I leave immediately, I can be there within the week.’

  ‘Of course, of course – you need cheering up. Some sleep, a few good meals, put all of this behind you. Let me help. You’ll need a stamped passport and transport, and I know the authorities responsible. Get back to your hotel and pack; I’ll sort the rest. There’s a mail coach that leaves the Piazza della Signoria at six tonight. You’re going to be on it.’

  ‘Thank you, Benjamin. You’ve saved me. I don’t think I could have answered for myself tomorrow.’

  Schlick rushed away to make the arrangements. Berlioz watched his retreating figure, pleased that his lie had been believed and that no later accusation of complicity could be attached to his friend’s assistance.

  Hector was not returning to the bosom of his family.

  Instead, he was going to Paris, where he would shoot three people before turning the gun on himself.

  They would be expecting him back in Paris, surely. After hurling such a bomb, did they really think he wouldn’t show up on their doorstep? The servants would already have been reminded of his startling appearance.

  They would be expecting someone who looked like Hector Berlioz.

  He crossed the Arno and found a French milliner’s shop.

  ‘Madame, I have a most unusual request, and a most pressing one. I need a complete lady’s maid outfit made to my size, and I need it by five o’clock this evening. Can it be done? I will pay whatever is required.’

  ‘Your size, monsieur?’ She was only mildly surprised; a couple of her gentlemen clients had made similar requests. This was Florence.

  ‘It is for a little comedy. Is this possible?’

  ‘There will be a premium; I’m sure you understand. Enrico!’

  The carefully groomed assistant ran the tape over Berlioz. ‘Madame, we can make an adjustment to something in stock. Just a nip in at the hips,’ he said appreciatively.

  ‘A hat, too,’ said Berlioz, aware that his hair would give the game away.

  ‘In that case, a veil is essential,’ said Enrico, realising that his client’s sideburns would look even more conspicuous with a dress. ‘Could I suggest that monsieur try something in green?’

  ‘Done,’ said Berlioz.

  ‘And if monsieur should ever find himself in Firenze again with a little spare time …’

  ‘I will be back at five.’ The would-be drag artist swept out of the shop.

  ‘An extra twenty francs should do it,’ the milliner added.

  ‘French men,’ sighed Enrico.

  Back at the Hôtel des Quatre Nations, Berlioz checked his armoury. He had brought two double-barrelled pistols with him from the Villa Medici in Rome, where his intention had been to go out shooting game on lazy weekends. In case of malfunction, he decided to have vials of laudanum and strychnine to hand for his own demise; to confess while dying was very – well, Shakespearean. Even a triple murder-suicide was entitled to a touch of poetry.

  His symphony, the poor soon-to-be orphan, was not yet fully revised; there was still some sonic glitter to add to its ball scene. Berlioz scribbled some marginalia into the score to help a subsequent editor with its completion should it ever again be performed (‘… in the composer’s absence’) and threw the sheaf of manuscript into a trunk with other effects to be despatched to his family after his departure.

  Such was his clear sense of purpose that all of this had taken no time at all. Food? Unthinkable. Looking suspiciously homicidal, he prowled the streets of Florence, stopping to admire Cellini’s Perseus in the Piazza della Signoria. The muscled warrior, sword in hand, held the decapitated head of Medusa aloft, the snakes of her hair still writhing.

  She really had it coming, Berlioz thought to himself. There is a majesty in vengeance. And that Benvenuto Cellini; he’s my sort of artist. If I lived any longer I would have written an opera about him.

  At five p.m. he returned to the milliner’s shop. The costume was ready, and when he tried it on, it fitted perfectly. />
  The milliner kept the change. ‘Your comedy will be a great success, I’m sure, monsieur,’ she said.

  ‘If so, you are bound to read all about it,’ Berlioz replied.

  Schlick had kept his word. At six, Berlioz climbed aboard the coach with its cache of correspondence bound for Paris. Seeing the expression on his passenger’s face, the driver decided that conversation would be pointless, even if they spoke the same language. All Berlioz noticed through the window in the darkening of evening was the worried expression of his friend. Behind Schlick, a final glimpse of Perseus’ sword gave statuesque approval to his bloody plan.

  It was quite simple, really. A lady’s maid was sure to obtain entrance to the Moke ménage. Once inside, he would produce his primed pistols and despatch Camille’s mother and fiancé with the same precision he employed on Italian quail. Camille’s own end would have a little more theatricality; seizing her hair with one hand as if she were a Medusa, he would fling his hat and veil away with the other, declaim something to do with faithlessness, Hell and vengeance (Shakespeare could provide the right words), and then ensure her brains were removed from her head in as spectacular a way as possible.

  Such a waste of a perfectly beautiful head, he knew. Almost exactly a year before, his friend Hiller had described Camille in an infatuated discourse.

  ‘You should meet her, Hector,’ he said. ‘You’ll understand just why I am in love with her. It’s platonic right now, but I’m working on it.’

  ‘Why should I meet her?’ Berlioz’s mind was still full of the Irish actress with whom he’d been infatuated for more than two years, whose presence haunted the symphony he was now churning out at speed.

  ‘I’ve told her all about you, and happened to mention the Harriet thing.’

  ‘Ferdinand! Really!’ Berlioz chided. His recent letters to Hiller had been written in giant scrawl over large pages, describing fresh bouts of torment.