Longing (3 page)

His wife was in the parlor, its door open, playing the piano and, in her disease-diminished voice, singing her heart out.

She was singing an old Saxon love song, meant to express the happiness of a man whose betrothed (albeit a ghost) has returned to him after they had been separated by war. But it was just as beautiful in a woman's voice and its words just as appropriate sung by a mother to her long-lost son:

Oh, now that you've returned to me

My life has done the same.

Without you I had lost my life,

My soul, my face, my name.

Without you I cannot exist.

Let death come take me too.

My heart is cold and empty when

My arms cannot hold you.

Hearing his mother sing, Robert rushed to her. He threw himself into her arms. But in fact it was the music into which he was throwing himself, because he did not know this woman, though he knew who she was.

Frau Ruppius stood weeping at the front door. August Schumann at that moment fell in love with his son through her and, to supply what little comfort he could as a substitute for his beautiful little boy, took her carefully in his arms.

Robert and his mother sang together every day. She called herself “the living book of arias.” She would play a song on a piano, they would sing it, and when they were done, he would play the same song on the piano. To her this was miraculous, as is a child's playing by ear to many people, who have no idea that it is hardly an uncommon talent and must not, if a life of agony is to be spared the child, be used to determine that the child be pushed in any serious way into the all-consuming embouchure of music.

What Christiane did not realize should have prompted her to let her son be eaten alive, as he was destined to be, was what he did with a song
after
he had played it by ear. For then he would begin to bang away at it, change it, vary it, minor it, major it, syncopate it, ruin it, revitalize it, tear it apart, not quite put it back together but close enough. “Stop it!” she would say and sometimes put her hands over her ears. She should have known better.

But she did know enough to arrange for him to take piano lessons with the one musician in town, Johann Kuntsch, the church organist, who was not much of a musician himself and not even much of a teacher but who loved music and introduced his pupil not only to the four-hand pieces by the likes of Hummel, Weber, and the inevitable Czerny, and not only to the piano arrangements of the overtures and even of the symphonies of Haydn and Mozart, but to sonatas by the virtually unknown Beethoven, including the second movement of
Les Adieux
, and only two years after it was written, when Robert was seven, to the piano part of Schubert's “Erlkönig,” and then, brand-new, when Robert was eight, to Beethoven's
Hammerklavier
, Beethoven! who made Robert want to tell everybody else in the world about him, Beethoven! who everybody else in the world didn't seem to want to hear about, or hear, at least in Zwickau, for he was too hard on the ears, they said, and this was in 1818. Robert was playing Beethoven in 1818 and was sick at heart and angry when people told him to play Rossini,
Tancredi
if he must, but please stop playing Beethoven because Beethoven
hurt
.

Fortunately, there was always one's own work to which to turn in order to torture people.

*
Gotthold Lessing was a distant relative of the Schumanns who had died some thirty years before Robert was born. What was to become Robert's favorite story about his famous ancestor concerned not his celebrated plays or the audacity of his political liberalism but an incident that occurred late one night when Lessing arrived home and found he had forgotten his key. He knocked on the door, awakening his servant, who called down from his window on the third floor, from which he did not recognize his master, “Professor Lessing is not at home.” “Please tell him then,” responded Lessing, “that I shall call at another time.” With that, he walked off into the night.

*
Whose duration as the First Reich inspired the optimistic and/or pessimistic prediction that the Third would last precisely as long.

*
Not lost upon some of these bibliothanatic veterans of the Napoleonic wars in Germany was the coincidence of its having been a matter involving a book that had united many Germans against them. In 1806, Johann Palm, a merchant in Nuremberg, was executed by the French for selling
Germany in Her Deepest Humiliation
. Herr Palm went to his death shouting, “But I didn't
write
it!” In fact, the book's author was anonymous, which caused the French to kill as many Germans as possible in the belief that sooner or later the writer would join the bookseller in hell.

Karlsbad

AUGUST 4, 1818

Nearly thirty years ago in Karlsbad I saved as a sacred relic

one of the concert programs you had touched
.

Robert Schumann

It is an amazing thing when a young person first experiences an art in its transcendence. There is a good chance this experience will destroy him, whether it inspires him to attempt such transcendence himself or discourages him from even the most meager of efforts in its pursuit. But there is no doubt that whether ultimately destroyed or saved, he is at that moment reborn. He is taken from his parents and released from the grip of duty. He is both freed from and bound to the past. He is coupled intimately and irrevocably with death, and is quite happy with the relationship. He is borne away on the wings of beauty from our inconsolably wretched earth.

When Robert's father took him to hear the pianist Ignaz Moscheles, Robert was eight years old and Moscheles twenty-four, which is to say that as musicians the former was merely novitiate while the latter was stolidly, as he himself put it,
entre deux âges
.

Before Moscheles began to play, what most impressed Robert about him was his hair. It was curly and soft and fairly fluttered even in the still air of the salon, which was moist from the waters of the spa to which it was adjoined (architecturally and pecuniarily) and from which could be heard through the open double doors the splashing and gurgling and occasional sighing of people immersed in its waters and swathed in its steam and engulfed in its muds. On their way in to the salon, Robert and his father had passed by its patrons with their various afflictions: from what was then called dropsy, which caused swaying, saclike accumulations of fluid in their tissues; to sciatica, which caused its sufferers to walk as stiffly as the monster in
Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus
, which had been published in English earlier that year and that August was eager to translate and publish himself in German; to housemaid's knee, which swelled the bursa of its victims so that they walked with what looked like ripe, burstable fruits on their knees, an ailment that, for the mostly bourgeois women in attendance at the spa, always brought with it the suggestion of deviant sexual practice rather than the household drudgery that had provided the malady its name.

Robert's own hair was dark and thick and oily but had never been, until he saw Moscheles's hair, a source of dissatisfaction. And it was not so much even then that he did not want his own hair as that he wanted Moscheles's.

Moscheles was a bravura pianist, of the Viennese school, though he was known to straddle the Clementi convention, in which Robert himself had become interested when Herr Kuntsch had acquired a copy of Clementi's new instruction book,
Gradus ad Parnassum
, which Robert had enjoyed using for the few minutes each day he spent studying before flying off into improvisations. But whereas Clementi was a devoted employer of, and advocate for, English pianos, Moscheles walked out over the floor of the salon and sat down at a piano made by Anton Walter in Vienna and, it had been whispered among a group of young patrons who seemed to have curled their hair like Moscheles's, owned by Mozart before he'd had to sell it after his final, failed tour to Frankfurt in 1790, where his appearances had been grievously outdrawn by the coronation of Emperor Leopold II.

While he didn't play Clementi's personally endorsed brand of piano, Moscheles did play his music.

The moment he began, Robert stopped looking at the pianist's hair, resisted the temptation to look at his fingers, and simply closed his eyes.

It was Clementi's Sonata in B-flat, which Robert had never heard but now, hearing, felt he would never stop hearing. True, there was something familiar about its opening theme, with its three-bar repeated succession of six eighth notes that Robert recognized as B-flat/F/B-flat. But beyond that theme, the music was wholly new and, if not wholly original, thrilling.

What dazzled him most was the playing. He had never heard anyone play the piano like this. He had not known the piano could be played like this. And, had he not been sitting there, he would not have believed that a piano ever would be played like this. This was, to his experience of piano playing, what the flight of an eagle was to a roasted pigeon. It was a new language, being spoken by a new being, being performed in a new world, being heard by a new boy who felt he was hearing it in confidence. He was destroyed by it, and what a luxury that was. His knees shook, his fingers trembled, his heart burst absolutely open, and—he was sure of it as he sat there sweating in that humid, heavenly room—his hair curled.

After this grand opening, Moscheles moved on, as was the custom, to some smaller works, all eight of Dussek's boringly named
Eight Pieces
, which title made Robert wince when Moscheles announced it, though he recovered his admiration when he learned, also from Moscheles, that each of the eight pieces had its own name, Robert's favorite of which—the name, not the piece—was “Consolation.”

Robert was surprised at first to hear Moscheles speak. It troubled him. He had not expected this man to have a voice. He did not want him to have a voice, or at least a voice that not only would he understand but that would be youthful and modest and altogether too human.

“Before Jan Dussek,” Moscheles addressed his listeners, “the pianist might sit facing his honored audience, or even with his back to it, but no pianist sat sideways to the audience. And now we all do, which makes one wish one had a better profile!”

Better profile! No man had ever been more beautiful, more heroic-looking than this one.

Moscheles ended his recital, as was also the custom, with work of his own composition, much to the delight of those who seemed to know the piece when he played the first note and thus gasped audibly and then gazed about with undisguised hauteur: “Alexander's March.” There seemed not one of his skills he left unexplored and unexploited in these variations, with their chords succeeding one another with such rapidity that Robert looked around to try to find the other, hidden piano. And while he was looking, he happened to be the first person in the audience to see a naked young man, dripping wet, come dancing wildly through the double doors at the back of the salon, his limbs jerking, his shoulders rolling grotesquely, and his face twisting weirdly as if a huge, invisible hand were squeezing it in rhythm to the music.

As the man danced his way down among the audience, people gasped yet again, and ladies either covered their eyes or used their hands to dry themselves when the man dripped spa water upon them.

When he reached Moscheles at the piano, the man stopped—his progress, not his dancing. In fact, now that he stood in one place, he danced more wildly than ever, quavering, wriggling, virtually convulsing right there at the side of Moscheles, who rather than seeming to be disturbed by this peculiar interruption played all the more wildly and passionately himself, glancing over at the man when he wasn't looking down at his fingers that moved so fast they appeared to be gloved.

Robert found himself both angry at the man and envious of him. Moscheles was smiling at him. Moscheles was playing for him. Moscheles was inspiring him. And the man was unafraid to display his passion for the virtuosity that seemed to be turning his body into the very music itself.

It was all Robert could do to sit there and not get up and dance himself.

He might have done just that had “Alexander's March” not reached its conclusion and Moscheles risen to bow first at the audience and then at the strange dancer, who, as the last note was echoing through the salon, seemed to quiver with it as it passed through him and then stood there completely still, turned sideways between Moscheles and the audience with his hands now resting modestly over his recently circumrotating private parts.

“I'm cured,” whispered the young man, just loudly enough for Robert to hear.

“What did he say?” asked Robert's father, who had his arm around his shoulder.

“He's cured,” Robert explained.

“As a shoulder of ham,” said Robert's father, who was fond of wordplay.

It turned out that the young man had chorea, otherwise known as St. Vitus's dance. For all the good it had done him, he had been taking the waters when the sound of the music inspired him both to seizure and to dance, which in his case were the same. But perhaps inspiration had indeed proven cure. He now stood next to Moscheles wrapped in a towel that had been provided, thoughtfully, by some staff members of the spa who had been prepared to throw a net over him and had been deterred from this necessary maneuver only when his seizure had ended completely coincident with the completion of Moscheles's playing.

Robert was desperate to approach Moscheles, which his father had urged him to do and to tell him that he, too, was a pianist. Yet Robert was unsure of the etiquette. There were others hovering near Moscheles. But no one was close enough to him to speak except the young dancer, who was engaging the great pianist in a visibly passionate if one-sided discussion. All the others seemed to be waiting for him to finish before drawing closer.

While the young man spoke directly into Moscheles's ear, which required him to stand on tiptoe, Moscheles nodded not so much patiently as desperately. His kind eyes wandered along the decorative molding where the salon walls met its ceiling, until finally his gaze drifted slowly down through the room and landed right on Robert. There was no question about it! Herr Moscheles was looking at him! And in his look was entreaty.