Longing (20 page)

“Liszt doesn't seem to mind endorsing Pierre Erard's pianos,” said Hiller, referring to Erard's proprietorship that had begun six years earlier when he sent Liszt off to England virtually attached to the Erard newly invented double-escapement piano, upon which the boy played so impressively for George IV that the king, dizzy from trying to follow the flight of Liszt's hands over the full seven octaves, proclaimed the Hungarian wunderkind the superior of the Hebrew Moscheles. But it had been here in Paris, even earlier, when Liszt had been her age, only twelve, that he had been proclaimed by the public itself the ninth wonder of the world. To this day one might buy in music shops replicas of his twelve-year-old head made from the cast fashioned by Franz Joseph Gall himself to further his phrenological study of genius. Clara remembered how the false report of Liszt's death had reached even Leipzig, several years ago, when he had disappeared from public for two years after the father of his lover, Caroline de Saint-Criq, had found Liszt with his daughter and forbidden him ever to see her again. Herr Schumann had helped her read the French in the
Etoile
obituary. Liszt had been fourteen at the time he had been torn from the arms of his love. He “died” two years later, not having been seen in public in all that time of his mourning for his lost Caroline. In two years Clara would be fourteen. It was Liszt's example, she believed, that gave her license to love.

“Liszt would endorse a pessary if the woman to whom it belonged allowed him to test it,” said Chopin.

“Hush!” said Mendelssohn. “The child!”

If she had known what a pessary was, she would have protested Mendelssohn's attempt to protect a delicacy in her temperament that she was determined to obliterate. She was not a child any longer. But neither was she wholly a woman. She was caught between the two, full of longing for what as yet could only be imagined.

“You inquired as to my name,” she said to Chopin, seeming to change the subject but in fact determined to turn it toward herself. “I am Clara Wieck.”

“I knew you looked familiar!” said Mendelssohn. “I have seen your portrait. But where?”

“My father leaves them at the homes we visit.”

“You see!” said Chopin.

“See what?” asked Hiller.

“That all we pianists are forced to prostitute ourselves. I endorse pianos. This young woman passes out her likeness.”

“I don't do anything like that,” said Mendelssohn.

“You don't need to,” said Chopin.

“Except kiss Goethe's ass,” said Hiller.

“Touché!” called Chopin.

“And get a new haircut,” added Hiller at Mendelssohn's expense.

“That's not fair!” Mendelssohn's hands went to his head to cover his hair.

“What do you think of his haircut?” Hiller asked her.

“I'd rather not say,” she said.

“If you're as fine a pianist as you are a diplomat, you must play gracefully indeed,” said Chopin.

“It's all Meyerbeer's fault,” said Mendelssohn, his hands still over his hair.

Chopin called her over to him and pretended to whisper in her ear, though it was clear he meant the others to hear. “Somebody told him he looked like Giacomo Meyerbeer, so he went out and immediately had his hair cut in order to assassinate the resemblance. Are you familiar with Meyerbeer?”

Chopin smelled sweet. He didn't look like a man who would smell sweet, because he was so pale, almost wasted. She wondered if perhaps this fragrance rose in the aftermath of his playing the piano, a kind of efflorescence of his art through his skin.

In answer to his question, she said, “My father took me to visit Monsieur Meyerbeer in the hope that he would arrange a public concert for me. That he has not done, but he did give us tickets to
Robert le diable
.”

“Just like Meyerbeer,” said Hiller.

“And what did you think of the opera?” asked Chopin.

“The chorus sang through megaphones,” she replied.

“Ever the diplomat,” said Chopin.

“Megaphones indeed!” said Mendelssohn. “And you wonder why I had my hair cut!”

“Let us at least see your hair again,” said Hiller.

“No!” Mendelssohn pressed his hands more firmly over the top of his head.

“After him!” said Hiller, seeming to direct this call to battle as much to her as to Chopin.

But it was Chopin who was first upon Mendelssohn, moving like the whippet he would have most resembled had lethargy and a kind of physical gloom not appeared to have cleaved him to the floor.

Hiller joined Chopin as the two of them tugged at Mendelssohn's hands until they had succeeded in pulling them from his head, at which point Mendelssohn fell to his hands and knees and Chopin vaulted over his back, and then Hiller did the same, and Mendelssohn rose and vaulted over Hiller, all three of them yelping boyishly and continuing to laugh as Mendelssohn called out, “Your turn, Fräulein Wieck,” and she pulled up her white dress from around her ankles and more acrobatically, she thought, than the others leapfrogged over Chopin, wondering if this resembled perhaps an orgy and laughing for the first time in Paris as she had not laughed since she had left home and Herr Schumann had appeared in her room running around like a ghost afraid of his own malevolently invisible shadow.

So it was that Papa found her, playing like the girl she was with the older brothers she did not have, these superb, and in Mendelssohn's case famous, musicians who were no further out of one end of their teenage years than she was from being received into the other. She knew her father well enough to know that whatever stern reproach might have risen to his throat was immediately softened into flattery when he realized who her playmates were.

As the four of them straightened their clothes and introductions were made, her father said to Chopin, “I might have taken your concerto for something by a pupil of mine back in Germany, Robert Schumann. I found it wonderful myself but could not help noticing that it was much too difficult for the ears of tonight's public audience. It is hardly in the fashion of today's music. And for that, sir, I congratulate you.”

It was a perfect display of her father's inability to apply the balm of praise without first inflicting the sting of censure. But at least he had not been so impolitic as to berate Chopin for having failed to receive him and her at home.

In the minutes that remained before he took his daughter back to their hotel, the talk among the four men was of the cholera that was said to be on its way to Paris.

Clara for her part was ready to die. She stood as close to Chopin as she dared, exulting in the sweet smell of his genius and the image in her mind of her leaping over his back.

True to his word, Chopin indeed spoke about her to Friedrich Kalkbrenner, who because of the flawless elegance of his playing was her father's favorite pianist, at least until Clara had played for him at his house. There, her father got into a fight with Monsieur Kalkbrenner after Madame Kalkbrenner had said that Clara would be ruined as a pianist if she continued to study in Germany, and her father had replied that that would never happen because “I shall never let her out of my hands,” words that sent a shiver up Clara's spine, as well they might any girl's. Then Kalkbrenner joined the conversation in defense of his beautiful young French wife. (Clara had noticed how common it seemed for rather homely, sometimes downright ugly, musicians to have pretty wives, as if the making of music might by itself create a desire that otherwise would no more have reared its head than the goddess of the moon would bathe in the Dead Sea.) “In Germany,” said Kalkbrenner, with the waxy, hardened smile Heine compared to that found on the lips of a mummified Egyptian pharaoh, “all pianists play in that groping, sprawling, scrambling Viennese style, and when they come to Paris”—at this he looked directly at her—“they bring that style with them just as surely as they do the silly ribbons in their hair.” Her father turned red as he screamed at Kalkbrenner in his own house that his methods of teaching his daughter were as far from the Viennese as Kalkbrenner's taste in furniture was from the
comme il faut
. Kalkbrenner merely laughed and turned away from his guests without another word.

“Did I use that term incorrectly?” asked her father as he pulled her toward the door.

“I have no idea,” she responded.

“I saw him kiss you when you finished playing,” he said—“what did he say when he kissed you?”

“He said I had
le plus grand talent
.”

“Even I know what that means. Do you suppose he would write it down for us so it would at least be of some use?”

“No, I do not, Papa,” she said, happy to have an excuse to leave anybody's house before midnight.

There was no one to support her but Paganini, who had arrived in Paris without any teeth, which he blamed upon a dentist in Prague, and said he would perform with her, but only, he joked in a strange whispering tone that made him sound as if his larynx were disintegrating, if she would play with his son, Achilles. She joked back that if he would allow her to play with Achilles, she would not require that he, Paganini, appear with her. Her father did not understand her wit and nearly exploded on the spot, but Paganini understood her perfectly and said that he would make two appearances with her for her kindness to his son, if only they could find a hall that would book the two of them. Her father didn't understand Paganini's wit either and actually said, “Oh, you underestimate your fame, sir,” to which Paganini replied, giving Clara so large a wink that she could discern it from behind his dark-blue glasses, “No, I don't.”

But Paganini was soon thereafter forced to withdraw, which he did with a considerable and sincere expression of regret, for he had become ill, though not, luckily, with the cholera that now pressed upon Paris seemingly from all sides and emptied the city of all those who could afford to flee the way a summer heat wave drives the rich to the breezes off the sea.

She was scheduled finally to appear before the public at large at the Hôtel de Ville on April 9, at six francs a ticket, with many gratis invitations sent out personally by her father proclaiming (with the French approved by the clerk in their hotel):
Mademoiselle Clara Wieck, jeune pianiste allemande, âgée de 12 ans
.

Virtually no one responded. Mendelssohn had fled to England, Hiller to Frankfurt, Liszt to Switzerland, and Chopin into seclusion in his house on the Cité Bergère.

Those Parisians who were left were not the sort who would go to a recital in the least plagued of times, and now they had taken to rioting in the streets and hurting no one but themselves and their compeers in their frustration at being unable to afford to follow the affluent into retreat from the invisible—until it struck—malevolence of this terrible disease.

And so when the management of the Hôtel de Ville canceled her engagement for lack of response, not to mention fear of mingling with whatever fools might actually attend, she was offered by Franz Stöpel the tiny hall at his music school, where, upon a piano munificently provided her by Pierre Erard from his shop on the rue du Mail, she played magnificently for a handful of people, whose names are lost to us but whose departed souls are among the most blessed wherever they may be, for they were present when this young German pianist, aged twelve, for the first time in her life played her entire program from memory and then improvised for them a music that was never written down and never heard again.

Four days later, she and her father escaped from Paris, he still grumbling, she expectant with bliss.

Leipzig

MAY 1, 1832

Now, you are my right hand
.

Robert Schumann

The very day she had returned with her father, after seven months away, including an unscheduled fourteen-day cholera quarantine in Saarbruck, Alwin and Gustav had come knocking on Robert's door, screaming, “Clara's home, come quick! Clara's home, come
now
!” He immediately regretted that he had not visited her brothers more often in her absence. He was fond of them and did not understand why they seemed almost to have no meaning, no existence, apart from their sister. He wondered if they could sense the presence of Christel in his room, though she hadn't been there in several days.

He followed them home. Or, more accurately, was dragged behind them, as each had him by a hand and pulled him through the narrow Leipzig streets and the dark little Leipzig alleys that opened finally into the huge cobbled market square, across which the boys ran fast enough to make Robert feel in his lungs the curdled accumulation of the pleasure of his cigars. Goethe, so recently dead—Robert enjoyed the thought that the last musician the master might have heard was Clara and the last wheedling, death-hastening voice her father's—had called Leipzig the “little Paris,” wholly appropriate in that Robert should now be running through it toward her who had just returned from its actuality.

He found her in the kitchen, sharpening knives. Her back was to him, as it often was when she played the piano, and he was struck at how there was the same competence in her movement, the knife in her right hand, the whetstone secured by her left, the bones of her shoulders riding rhythmically through the soft fabric of her dress and the wisps of her hair that had come free of their ribbon grazing her neck as the music from the knife opened him up to her.

So intensely did she seem to be performing this most kitchenly, domestic, of tasks that he was afraid to speak to her, for fear she might do injury to herself with the knife whose blade threw the day's fading sunlight back at him each time she turned it over in her hand. He simply stood watching her, engrossed in her movements and wondering how it could be that she could not feel his presence when he felt hers, quite apart from her visibility, so keenly.