Longing (50 page)

Wagner had discovered Schopenhauer and sent him a copy of Gottfried von Strassburg's original Tristan poem, thinking the philosopher would be moved by this tragic tale of love and the gift to love of suicide. But, in splendid irony, Schopenhauer despised the strategems of love by which a man might sacrifice his life to win a woman. What was a woman compared to a dog? The great love of Schopenhauer's life was his poodle!

Wagner got no acknowledgment from Schopenhauer. But from Schopenhauer's work he received the notion of the final denial of the will to live. Never having enjoyed the true bliss of love himself, he would drown Tristan and Isolde in it, suffuse them with it, give them a satiety so complete it could be achieved not through the act of physical love but only through death. The denial of the will to live was redemptive. Death through desire became a saintly death. The body and the spirit were finally joined. And in the only possible way. Through the denial of the will to live. Through suicide.

Robert has tried to starve himself to death. He was inspired in this, however, less by Wagner than by Nikolay Gogol, of whom he thinks now and then when he gets hungry. Gogol starved himself too, though for the most understandable if stupidest of reasons: In a fit of self-disgust he had thrown his writing, handful by handful, into the fire, only to discover too late that among the pages burned were the only ones he'd meant to save, those to a second volume of
Dead Souls
. All were gone, irrecoverable, either from the fire or from his mind, the latter of which he had expected would be unburdened by the burning of his papers but instead was itself inflamed by discontent, regret, frustration, insanity—many an artist's companions on the path to flitting fulfillment. Gogol is filled with a remorse a thousand times more painful than what Robert felt when burning up his labors toward an opera on the Round Table. Gogol wants to die. Gogol wants to die as slowly as it took a piece of writing to emerge from mind to paper. Gogol wants to die by taking nothing in, the way an artist lives by giving forth. It is the perverse nourishment of the self-forsaken. It is the starvation not of the body but of the body's song; it is the starvation of the voice.

It was Ivan Turgenev who told him about Gogol. And it was that old lecheress Bettina von Arnim who told him during her visit to Endenich that Turgenev had been unfaithful to his great love, the magnificent if ugly mezzo-soprano Pauline Viardot, who just happens to be one of Clara's best friends. And with whom had Turgenev been unfaithful? A pianist, naturally, Bettina had seemed delighted to inform Robert, as if to imply that no man could resist the sight of a woman's bottom on a piano bench.

Sometimes Robert wonders if he loves Clara as much as Turgenev loves Pauline, infidelity notwithstanding—Turgenev's, for Robert could no more have been unfaithful to Clara, once they were married, than a bird could betray its own song by singing another's.

When they were apart, Turgenev begged Pauline to send him the cuttings from her fingernails. And all Robert has requested from Clara are some music paper and newspapers and cigars and pictures of her and of the children and of Johannes and a ribbon from her hair or hat to tie around her letters or to use as a bookmark and perhaps an atlas or two with which to plan his escape.

But, then, there is something about his marriage to Clara that has made her less lovable. Not to himself, no, but to other men. She had been such a beautiful girl, even if she had never in her life considered herself beautiful. But it was not her beauty that had captured him, not solely, but her spirit, her passion, her abandon, her fund of perversity, the ways she had teased and tricked and amused and aroused and seduced him. And now—if he could speak of now, not having seen her in so long and longing so to see her—she had grown into a kind of severity, from her dark dresses to the way she wore her hair stretched back from her face to her condemnation in others what she had enjoyed so much herself.

So many men had loved her when she was young. Clara would play the piano, and the world climbed up her dress. In Vienna they even named a pastry after her, Torte à la Wieck, so they too could eat her. It was described in the
Theaterzeitung
as an ethereally light confection that flew like an angel into one's mouth.

But Pauline Viardot went on inspiring such passion, and not simply among the likes of George Sand's wistful son Maurice. Charles Gounod had loved Pauline. So had Hector Berlioz, but that is to be expected, his heart so easily ripped from his chest and fed to the nearest woman. Harry Heine had probably loved her too, and in the process of mourning her absence from the Opéra Bouffe managed to demean Clara's even better woman friend, Jenny Lind, who has been heard these days to tell Clara not to be seen so much with Brahms, trying to impose upon her a bourgeois respectability at the very moment she is managing to peel it from herself.

Heine has died. He was the greatest poet of Germany. And one of those Jews, like the Mendelssohns, not so much forced into Christian baptism, since no one held a gun to their heads, as flattered into it. As a genius, would you rather be a Jew and obscure or a Christian and celebrated? Would you rather be reality or a dream? For all the good being a Christian had done him, Robert might as well have been a Jew. Then at least he would have been able to excuse his humiliations (“Are you musical too?”) not to mention decorate with a Jewish star his many
New Journal of Music
contributions, as Heine's editors anointed his to the
Augsburg Daily
. But conversion in that direction was uncommon in Germany. And those Jews who became Christians could not hide even in their genius, not from the genius of others guilty of the same crime. So it was that when Felix Mendelssohn in merely his twentieth year brought J. S. Bach back from the dead upon conducting the
St. Matthew Passion
from its only existing copy, and he said, “To think that it has been left up to me, a Jewish boy, to revive this greatest of all Christian music,” it remained for Harry Heine to say, “If I had had the luck to be the grandson of Moses Mendelssohn, I would certainly not use my talent to set to music the pissing of the lamb.”

What Robert would set to music, if he could set anything to music now that music appears to be dead to him except for the tediously disturbing hallucinatory notes he hears in his head, would be what Heine wrote at the end of his life:

How slowly time, that horrid snail,

Comes sliding at its snaily pace!

But I, who cannot move at all,

Am stuck here in this endless place.

No glint of sun, no ray of hope

Can pierce this black cell through the gloom.

I know that it will be the grave

For which I'll trade this gruesome room.

But what Robert had actually set to music in the first of his many settings from Harry Heine, when he began to write songs in his longing for Clara Wieck, was what he sings now to himself, wholly within his head, sixteen years later in his longing for Clara Wieck Schumann:

Waking in the morning,

I ask, Where can she be?

In the evening I lament

She hasn't come to me.

And finally in the dark of night

With agony I scream

To realize she won't visit me

Except within a dream.

In his dreams, she plays for him. He sees her at the piano as a child—as she had been as a child—and himself next to her, not as he had been, a wild young man falling slowly in love with a child, but as a child himself. He had remained something of a child, he knew, though marriage and the births of his own children had forced him to assume the demeanor of the stable bourgeois. There were books to keep, money to attempt to make, servants to be hired, bags to be packed for Clara's tours or for their moves from city to city and, within the cities, from apartment to apartment. But he'd never felt he'd found his way into the center of life itself, or the center of his own life.

She had always played for him—what music she had written, and what he had. And what he had, she played for others. Only she and Liszt, and rarely he. No one else had played what he had written. Mendelssohn had conducted some, but he didn't play the notes himself. He did not become intimate, as much as Robert admired him, loved him, even; he did not, despite his keyboard virtuosity, dirty his fingers with those same pesty and seductive “musical cantharides” in Robert's music that Heine had described in Liszt's.

Chopin did not play him. Moscheles did not play him. Thalberg did not play him. Camilla Pleyel did not play him. Kalkbrenner did not play him. Henselt did not play him. Not even Ludwig Spohr's wife played him, nor could she; as her husband had informed Robert, she could neither execute nor understand his Symphonic Etudes. Who could blame her? Neither could Clara, though Robert hadn't told Spohr
that
. But, referring to her Börsenhalle recital, he had reassured the shaken Clara:
You were right to play them only once, and that once for me; they are not suitable for the public; I would be pitiable should I complain that people had not appreciated music that was not intended to win approval but exists, as art must exist, for its own sake
.

The first time Liszt came to Leipzig, to give a benefit concert for the Gewandhaus orchestra's pension fund, he played Robert's
Carnaval
.

The audience hated it.

Liszt thought they hated
him
and refused to leave his room in the Hotel de Bavière. Robert sat with him there, saying hardly a word as Liszt consumed what he explained (as he offered to share with Robert) was his customary breakfast of raw oysters, which he washed down with black coffee he let cool and drank as other men drank beer, glass after glass of it, from morning, he said, until night, an antidote both to liquor and to the ennui that circumfused his mind no matter how extravagantly he played the piano or agitatedly he made love or repeatedly he scattered the ashes of his resurrected self.

Robert felt they had known one another for twenty years. There became no need to talk. Hours went by. Finally, Robert stood up and said, “There! We've been speaking with open hearts.”

How Liszt had laughed! He seemed cheered completely out of his dejection and came to Robert and took his arms in his hands—those famed hands! those lightning-flashing, volcanic, Heaven-storming hands! “You are as strange as your music.”

“Thank you.”

“And thank
you
again for your dedication of your Fantasie. I shall attempt to learn it to bring you honor and me as little shame as possible. It will be, you know, a very difficult piece for the public to digest.”

“I know.”

“Not all your work is thus. You're not like Wagner—every piece a masterpiece. Or so intended. He writes nothing small, nothing intimate, nothing to indicate the quiet breaths we take between our cries for justice and eternal recognition. Nothing for the chamber; everything for the vault. But you…opaque at one moment, transparent the next. My daughter, Blandine, is but four. She's like you, perhaps. Very silent, sweetly grave, but philosophically gay. Two or three times a week, I play for her your
Kinderscenen
. They enchant her completely. And me as well. How can this be?”

“Perhaps I'm like someone who writes books for children and books for adults. The books for children are for the best of children, which means that all children love them. The books for adults are for the best of adults, which means that almost no one loves them. For children, one writes in their language. For adults, one writes in one's own language. When a language is not understood, it is not the fault of the speaker.”

“I have always considered myself a servant of the public.”

“And you have the public's love to prove it.”

“And you?”

“Oh, I love you too.”

“No no no no no.” Liszt laughed again. His face was so beautiful, so manly, that it seemed superfluous for him to smile. The very attention he paid was sufficient indication of his concern and even his possible delight. He was one of those fabled seducers who did not choose among his prey. He wanted everyone to love him. Whatever melancholy he suffered was the result both of his success in this and his occasional failure, as in his performance of Robert's music.

“There is only one person's love I want,” Robert answered.

A few evenings later she was in attendance, with Robert, at a party the Mendelssohns gave for Liszt.

“I am upset with him,” she said.

“Why?”

“He played your
Carnaval
as if he were sight-reading it.”

“He
was
sight-reading it.”

“And not very well.”

“I'm grateful he plays me at all.”

“He doesn't play you as I do.”

“And I don't play you as he does,” he replied, touching her bottom through her dress, an almost ensanguined silk that faded to pink at her breasts, where the fabric ended in a pale palette of flesh.

He had thought she'd returned from Vienna, years before, in love with Liszt, so highly had she praised him, so spirited had she become in discussing his attentions. He'd been at first confused by this: Liszt was famed beyond envy, should one desire fame, and beautiful beyond beauty, his face become a work of art and the worship of that art catechized into adoration. But Liszt was
his
champion. Liszt had written publicly in praise of him and had gone out of his way to play his music—his Sonata and his
Novelletten
in particular, so that Robert had dedicated his Fantasie to Liszt, out of gratitude and the hope he might choose to perform it as well. To the extent that Liszt played Robert's music, he embodied Robert. Therefore, if Clara loved Liszt, it was another way of loving him, Robert. We are all mixed together in each other, he determined, and those we love are made love to by the one who makes love to us. And we make love to whomever our beloved loves.

As if to demonstrate the proof of Robert's theory through an application of its opposite, Clara removed his hand from her bottom while saying, “He doesn't play me at all.”