Longing (19 page)

She actually found herself rehearsing her lines in case she might meet up with Nerval and his pack of rowdies, known as
les bousingos:
“I am Clara Wieck, whose fanny was fondled by Herr Goethe before he gave me this medallion of himself accompanied by a note that says, ‘To the greatly gifted artist Clara Wieck.'” The problem was, her father carried the medallion sealed up in its box, and she knew she could never ask him to display it in her favor to these beautiful young men of whom she wanted nothing more than to sit in their presence and be desired by them.

So instead of a glass of wine or a cup of tea at Café Brébant, she had to be satisfied with her father buying her an ice cream from Violet in the faubourg Montmartre or a pastry from Frascati, whose bakery was in the same building in which Balzac had lived and was right across the street from Camille Pleyel's famous piano shop, where Monsieur Pleyel sold the pianos his firm manufactured.

Soon after they arrived in Paris on February 15, her father took her to the Salle Pleyel, which was on the ground floor of that magnificent building, and introduced her by saying, “This is my daughter, Clara. She plays the piano. She plays the piano better, in fact, than does your wife.”

Monsieur Pleyel shook his head and laughed and said, “Nobody plays the piano better than my wife. Except perhaps for Chopin.”

“Chopin,” repeated her father. “Yes, I've seen your advertisements in
La France Musicale
. I tried to call on Chopin, upon the recommendation of another of my pupils, Robert Schumann, but Chopin was too impolite to receive us, though Schumann himself has written a most positive review of Chopin's Variations on
“Là ci darem”
from
Don Giovanni
. Would you care to hear my daughter play them?”

“Thank you, no,” said Monsieur Pleyel, much to Clara's relief.

Though she had been, she believed, the first to play Chopin's piece in Germany—at the Town Hall in Weimar two days after she had received Goethe's approbation—she could remember when she and every other pianist had considered it incomprehensible and virtually unplayable. She had been forced to spend eight whole days learning it to the degree that it might satisfy the Weimar audience, if not herself. And the last thing she wanted was to sit down here to play and be interrupted by the arrival of Monsieur Pleyel's wife, the former Marie Moke. It was not that Marie had studied piano with Herz, with Moscheles, with Kalkbrenner himself, and had become the wunderkind against whom all other wunderkinder were measured. It was Marie's renowned beauty that intimidated Clara, filling her with a fear of what would happen should she be playing the piano and get a first glimpse of this famous young woman rising toward her—hair, face, neck, breasts—over the keyboard. As if it weren't enough for her poor assaulted imagination to picture this, she now began to worry that Anna de Belleville might marry Pierre Erard, whose pianos were the first equipped with foot pedals and were said to be Anna's favorites among the French—though their reputation had suffered ever since Hector Berlioz had written a story about how an Erard piano had begun to play Mendelssohn's GMinor Concerto all by itself and could be made to stop not by the application of holy water, not even by dismemberment, but only by its pieces being set on fire! And they said Berlioz and Mendelssohn had been friends ever since they'd met in Rome just the prior year and met every morning to sing Gluck's
Armide
together!

If anyone was on fire, it was she. Without waiting for her father, she rushed into the street out of Monsieur Pleyel's vast expanse of threatening instruments.

So it was with no small sense of shame and embarrassment that she found herself back there a few nights later, on February 26, for Chopin's oft-postponed Paris debut, originally scheduled for Christmas day, when Clara wished it had been held so she would not have to be here tonight, hiding her face against her father's blue sleeve as he pointed among the audience that barely began to occupy the three hundred seats of Monsieur Pleyel's large concert hall, saying, “My God, there's Mendelssohn!” “My God, there's Liszt!” “My God, there's—look at that
nose
!—Pixis!” his German the only sound she could understand among what she realized were almost entirely Polish voices, until Chopin himself came out and played upon the smallest piano in the place, a little monochord that belonged to Friedrich Kalkbrenner, his own Variations on
‘Là ci darem.'
She thought they were the most beautiful thing she had ever heard, aside from Herr Schumann's improvisations, though her father groused that the Variations were not even recognizable as those she played because of the stiff and obstinate nature of Kalkbrenner's piano.

After the concert, her father wanted to introduce her to all the assembled musicians, so they would know her name and face and prepare one day to tremble before the onslaught of her fingers upon a better keyboard than might be found here in Monsieur Pleyel's emporium; but Clara, still trying to hide against his frock coat, said, “No, I am not ready,” and once again slipped into the street.

She felt not ready either when he took her once more to hear Chopin, this time at Abbé Bertin's, where Chopin played his E-Minor Concerto and once again her father sat there criticizing him—
him
and not even his piano this time, accusing the very Paris that had refused to listen to her play the piano of having made Chopin sloppy and careless in his own playing.

“You are wrong about that,” she whispered, though the piece had ended and the room crackled with applause.

“I am never wrong,” he whispered back.

This time when she left him she headed not for the street but for the artists' room at the side of the stage.

“You were wonderful, Monsieur Chopin,” she rehearsed in her mind as she walked, wishing she knew how to address the man in Polish but hoping he would, in his solitude after his performance, forgive her ignorance as that of an inexperienced young woman who was on her first journey into the great world.

By the time she knocked on the door and then opened it herself when there was no response, and discovered that Chopin was hardly alone, it was too late for her to retreat.

There he stood, almost frail without his black coat, hardly larger than she, with a beautiful, delicate face and skin so transparent he seemed, like his music, visibly invisible.

Next to him was a very handsome man whom she recognized even though he appeared to have had a strange new haircut, Felix Mendelssohn.

On the other side of Chopin was someone else she recognized, Ferdinand Hiller, who was a bit older than the other two and was known to have been one of Hummel's finest pupils. But what most intrigued her about Hiller was the story of how he had become the piano teacher of none other than Marie Moke, when she was a student at Madame Daubrée's school for girls, and of course like everybody else fell in love with her and had to find a place to make love to her and persuaded Berlioz to let him use his apartment, where he took her and made love to her and while he was making love to her Marie was said to have imagined it was Berlioz himself making love to her and so she went right out and seduced Berlioz.

It was as if the very air in Paris bred lovers just as it bred pianists, or at least drew them here, to compete with one another and, if she could believe her father's assessment of their predilections, to destroy one another. Liszt was in Paris, and Thalberg, Kalkbrenner, Herz, Pixis, Dreyschock, Chopin, Mendelssohn, Hiller, Marie Pleyel, and herself as well, her little self, so eager to play and love and grow into her years and life.

Yet these men before her now in the artists' room, famous as they were, seemed hardly on the brink of mutual annihilation. They were in their shirtsleeves and appeared to be in the midst of a toast, champagne glasses held high as they turned to stare at her.

“Who have we here?” said Hiller in German-accented French.

“I have never seen such eyes,” said Chopin in what she supposed must be Polish-accented French.

“You look familiar,” said Mendelssohn in perfect French, the first to address her directly.

“You must have seen her on the stage,” said Chopin. “A tear in those eyes would be visible from the last row.”

“Gentlemen,” said Hiller, drawing them back to their toast.

“Excuse us,” Mendelssohn said to her.

“May his soul rest in peace,” said Hiller.

The three young men clinked their glasses and then drank down their champagne with one tilt each of their splendid heads.

Somebody must have died. She couldn't imagine who. She hoped it wasn't a member of any of their immediate families, for that would have made inappropriate the drinking of champagne.

“I'm sorry,” she said, testing her French and her nerve with as few words as possible.

Now they all looked at her with the slightly pinched faces of people who have swallowed bubbles too abruptly.

“No need to apologize. We were merely drinking to the passing of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,” said Mendelssohn, in whose own eye a tear was suddenly visible. “Perhaps you have heard of him.”

“Goethe's dead!”

“Fetch that girl a chair,” said Chopin to no one in particular.

Clara shook her head. She didn't want to sit down, though she wouldn't have minded someone's arm to lean on. If Chopin hadn't looked so fragile, hadn't been renowned not only for his playing but also for the fact that he was cared for by fourteen physicians in Paris alone, she might have clung to him, might even have taken his hand in case some of the power of his playing might pass into her. It was common knowledge that he had left Poland on the eve of the revolution and had been in anguish ever since he had learned in Stuttgart, while on his way to Paris, that Warsaw had fallen to the Russians.

“I played for Herr Goethe just weeks ago,” she said.

When they looked at her confusedly, she added, “The piano.”

“But you are so young,” said Chopin.

“She is
not
,” said Mendelssohn. “I played for Goethe when I was twelve. How old are you?”

“Twelve.”

“You see!” said Mendelssohn.

“Goethe didn't mention you had played for him, Herr Mendelssohn.”

“You see,” he said to the others. “She knows who I am.”

“Of course I do,” she said.

“It's over ten years ago,” he said. “I played Bach fugues for him and then I improvised and then I played Mozart. After that, he called me his David and himself my Saul—probably because my teacher had introduced me by saying that while I was the son of a Jew I was no Jew myself. ‘I haven't heard you yet today,' Goethe would say to me, ‘come cheer me up with your playing,' rather like Count Keyserlingk calling young Goldberg to him to play the variations Papa Bach had written to protect the count from the demons in the mind that are said to rob men of their sleep, though I must say I have no trouble sleeping and never have.”

“I would have thought as much,” said Chopin, who looked as if he slept as poorly as Herr Schumann.

“Goethe kissed me, once every morning and twice every afternoon,” Mendelssohn said to her. “Did he kiss you as well?”

“No,” she answered, “but he did put his hand on my fanny.”

All three men laughed, Hiller being the first to stop when he said to Mendelssohn, “Watch out for this one. She could be another Delphine.”

“Who is Delphine?” she asked.

“Someone much older than you,” said Mendelssohn.

“Not much,” said Hiller.

“She meant little to me—Delphine von Schauroth”—her name crawling from Mendelssohn's small mouth as if merely to utter it brought pain to his heart.

“I believe you wrote your G-Minor Concerto for her?” Chopin seemed exasperated at the lies love spoke.

“Only because she's a wonderful pianist. And are you a wonderful pianist?” Mendelssohn asked her.

Where was her father when she needed him?

“You might judge for yourself if you could hear me, but I cannot get a hearing in this city.”

“Then you must indeed be a wonderful pianist,” said Chopin. “What can one expect in a city whose music is controlled by the likes of Cherubini and Lesueur and Paër, who taken together, heaven forbid, are over four thousand years old, and a city that celebrates the operas of Hérold and Auber and Boïeldieu? But tell me your name. I'll get Kalkbrenner to have you play at his house. He owes me a favor.”

“You owe that thief yourself more likely,” said Mendelssohn, who was known throughout Paris for having accused Kalkbrenner of stealing themes from Hiller and, worse, for writing in what Mendelssohn called the fervidly lachrymose key of F-sharp minor.

“Not true at all!” Chopin seemed indignant. “Kalkbrenner introduced me to Pleyel; I agreed to endorse Pleyel's pianos; Pleyel gave me a piano; only by happenstance is it the most sensitive piano I've ever played. When I told this to Liszt, he said, ‘Sensitive! One brings a woman to her climax not by tickling her but by banging her. Pianos and women run with equal haste from men who proclaim their sensitivity.'”

Before he went on, and apparently to silence Mendelssohn, who appeared to have something to say if only he could find words to fill his wide-open mouth, Chopin said to Clara, “I trust you are young enough to have no idea whatsoever Liszt was talking about, though if you do then I apologize for his very insensitivity both to pianos and to women.”

Before Clara could respond, as unsure as she was whether she should admit that she felt sure she knew the meaning of a woman's climax though she had never before actually heard it mentioned aloud, Chopin continued with his explanation for the discomfort he felt at the exploitation of his name. “Who is the only one in this whole equation that comes off without an obligation yet with two others in his debt? Kalkbrenner! I am second to none in my admiration for his playing—the rest of you are all zeros next to him, and so am I; he is the only one whose shoelaces I am not worthy of tying. Nonetheless, in this matter,
he
owes
me
. Or do you think I actually enjoy seeing my name used next to the word ‘ravishing' in
La France Musicale
in order to help Monsieur Pleyel sell his pianos? I would
never
use the word ‘ravishing' about anything! First they prostitute us by tempting us mercilessly to endorse their products, and then they put into our mouths words wholly out of keeping with our manner of discourse in the real world.”