Good Things I Wish You (3 page)

5.

R
OBERT
S
CHUMANN HAD HIS
first nervous breakdown at fifteen. He recovered and went on to law school, but he dreamed of a career as a concert pianist, and, at twenty-one, he became a boarder and pupil at the home of the famed piano instructor Friedrich Wieck. There he encountered eleven-year-old Clara, who’d already mastered techniques that he could only approximate. His own progress, by comparison, at Wieck’s
Piano-Fabrik
^*
was slow. When Wieck left with Clara for an eight-month Parisian tour, Robert—in a vain attempt to strengthen his fingers—permanently damaged the nerves in his right hand, with a device of his own invention. To no avail, he tried the remedies of the day: poultices, rest, and
Tierbaden,
the latter of which involved inserting his injured hand into the fresh-slaughtered body of an animal.

It was 1832. It was Leipzig, Germany. The city boasted
150 bookstores, 50 print shops and 30 newspapers, in addition to the dazzling Fräulein Wieck, who returned, triumphant, from Paris.
^*
By then, Robert had realized that, for him, a concert career was not possible. He turned to composition instead, and soon he was relying on Clara to interpret and perform what he’d written. At first Friedrich looked on with approval. It would be good for the girl to associate herself with this gifted, if controversial, composer. It would inspire her own compositions, already under way. But by 1835, Friedrich couldn’t help but notice the way Clara grieved over Robert’s engagement to Ernestine Von Fricken, another young piano student living in one of the boarders’ rooms above the
Piano-Fabrik.
A hastily scheduled five-month concert tour did nothing to lift his daughter’s mood, though she brightened considerably upon her return, at which point in time, we now know from letters, she and Robert became increasingly attached, increasingly committed to each other.

In fact, Robert was still engaged to Ernestine, but Wieck’s suspicion on that front was only one of his objections to the match. Schumann, he said, was a drunkard. He was mentally unstable. He’d be unable to provide Clara with the financial and emotional support she needed. She’d sacrifice her artistic gifts to a life spent bearing children, managing a household, buoying up another’s talents—

No.

Wieck forbade the couple to see each other. He forbade any correspondence between them. When, in 1837, after eighteen months of separation, Robert formally asked Wieck’s permission to marry Clara, Wieck’s response was to set out with his daughter on a grueling Viennese tour that would last for the next seven months. He pocketed the proceeds of these concerts, leaving Clara without money for necessities. Still, she would not renounce Schumann. In response, Wieck barred her from his house. He held her piano hostage, along with everything else she owned. In the end, she and Robert were forced to take Wieck to court, where at last they were granted permission to marry. This they did on September 12, 1840, the day before Clara’s twenty-first birthday.

Clara’s mother, Marianne—to whom Clara had turned for refuge—signed the wedding license.

One can’t help but imagine that she did so with a vengeance.

And yet, both parents must have grieved to see Wieck’s worst predictions come to pass. Clara’s first child, Marie, was born after less than a year. Seven more children would follow, including one who did not survive. Whenever Robert composed on his piano, Clara couldn’t play her own—he found the noise too distracting—which meant that her practice time was confined to the hour or two, at the end of each day, when he strolled to his pub for a beer.

“My piano playing again falls completely by the wayside,” she wrote in the marriage diary, “as is always the
case when Robert composes. Not a single little hour can be found for me in the entire day! If only I don’t regress too much!”
^*
For a while, she continued to book concert tours, but Robert’s growing litany of symptoms—exhaustion, difficulty in speaking, even temporary blindness—prevented him from traveling with her. Left alone, he grew wretched, dangerously depressed.

“This desolation in the house, this emptiness in me!” he wrote in a letter that reached her in Copenhagen. “Letting you go was one of the most foolish things I ever did in my life and it certainly won’t happen again. Nothing tastes good or right. On top of that, I really am not well at all—”
^†

Wieck had been right on that count, too. Robert’s mental and physical health continued to deteriorate. The couple moved first to Dresden and then to Düsseldorf, searching for better air, different doctors, any promise of relief.

It was in Düsseldorf, fourteen years after their wedding, that Robert would tell Clara over the breakfast table,
I am not worthy of your love,
before slipping out of the house in his dressing gown and slippers, hurrying toward the Rhine.

The cold February air like a good taste in his throat. Symphonies of angels singing from the rooftops.

Already he was twisting his wedding ring from its tight embrace of his finger.

You can’t belong to him and to me at the same time. You will have to leave one, him or me.

—Robert, in a letter to Clara, 1838
^*

You are too dear, too lofty for the kind of life your father holds up as a worthy goal; he thinks it will bring true happiness…No, my Clara will be a happy wife, a contented, beloved wife.

—Robert, in a letter to Clara, 1838
^*

6.

N
OW
I
WAS THE
one who was bubbling away, but Hart didn’t seem to mind. The lines between his eyes deepened as he stirred his espresso with a small, bright spoon. I told him about the fishermen who pulled Robert from the river, the medal of valor they received, on display now at the Schumann house in Zwickau.
^*
I told him how, before Robert was brought home, Clara fled to the house of a neighbor, leaving her children in the care of servants, until Robert could be transported, by anonymous carriage, to an asylum outside Bonn. I told him how—ostensibly on the advice of Robert’s doctors—Clara would not see her husband again, not even once, until three days before his death. By then, it was July 1856. She hurried home from a concert tour in England, but instead of heading to Robert’s bedside—or to see her children in Düsseldorf—she met Brahms for a visit to the Black Sea. From there, they traveled to Bonn, where Robert recognized Clara and tried to
embrace her. Two days later, he died, alone, while Clara accompanied Brahms to the train station.
^*

“It is obvious what happened, isn’t it?” Hart said. In the courtyard, the band had started to play; he pulled his chair closer to mine. Around us, the tables had filled with other couples, groups of laughing women, people shouting to be heard. “She fell in love with the younger man.”

“Initially, at least, the younger man fell in love with her and Robert, as a couple. No, not like that,” I said as Hart raised his brows. “The first time Brahms met the Schumanns, he ended up staying in Düsseldorf for a month. Every day he’d have lunch with them, walk with them, play with the children, all of whom were studying piano. You can imagine the household—it must have been simply ringing with music. And of course Brahms shared all his compositions with Robert and Clara, who critiqued them, championed them, helped him find sympathetic publishers. Every musical genius of the time passed through that house: the Mendelssohns, the violinist Joseph Joachim, Liszt. How romantic their lives must have seemed!”

Hart sipped his wine. “What was the cause of Robert’s death?”

“Advanced syphilis. Clara never knew.”

“Romantic, indeed.”

“He contracted it as a student. Actually, Wieck’s resistance to the marriage probably saved Clara’s life. By the time she and Robert married, Robert was no longer contagious.”

“Just destined for the nuthouse, poor sucker.”

“Though Clara insisted he was getting better. And Brahms returned to Hamburg believing this was so. Then, in February, Robert slips out of the house and—”

“Splash,” Hart intoned.

“Splash,” I repeated. “As soon as Brahms gets word of it, he returns to Düsseldorf to help. This is in 1854. In 1855, Clara moves the children to a new apartment, and Brahms takes a room in the very same building.”

Hart laughed. “So it’s just as I said. Except the younger man fell in love with the older woman.”

“Not necessarily. First of all, Clara was expecting her eighth child when Robert was sent to the asylum. Brahms would have been there for the final months of the pregnancy when she was particularly miserable, uncomfortable—okay, I’ll say it, unattractive. And then, as soon as she recovered from childbirth, she took off on a three-month concert tour of northern Germany. At Christmastime she came home for a while, but then she left for Vienna, and after that she went to—oh, Budapest, I think. Then Prague. Finally England. Wherever she could book an engagement.”

“She needed the money.”

“Of course,” I said, “but Robert had been the musical director of the Düsseldorf orchestra, and the city voted to continue his salary, at least for that first year. So her motives couldn’t all have been financial, especially since there was still reason to believe that Robert was coming back home.”

“Perhaps she felt Brahms to be too much of a temptation.”

“More likely she just really missed her first love: performing. As soon as Robert was hospitalized, she avoided both her husband and, frankly, her children, too. Not that this was a completely conscious choice. But after working so hard to restart her career, she must have been terrified that someone—or something—would bring it to a halt yet again. Brahms, at the time, encouraged her work, particularly her composing. While she was on tour, this twenty-something kid took over the management of her household: servants, children, bookkeeping, all the details that were driving her crazy during the years she was Schumann’s wife.”

“Because this twenty-something kid was in love with her.”

“Clara and Robert had helped him with his career. He would have been eager to repay that debt. And of course he had the run of the house, which included access to Robert’s library and piano, so there was something in it for him, too. At one point, Brahms’s mother writes and says, Look, what you are doing is admirable, but you’ve got to think of your own career and let Frau Schumann fend for herself. Brahms ignores this. By the way, Frau Brahms was
seventeen
years older than her husband, but there’s nothing in her letter to indicate she thought there was anything inappropriate going on.”

“Inappropriate,”
Hart repeated, as if he were tasting the word. “I believe you are meaning
hanky-panky
.”

His diction, coupled with its delivery, cracked me up.

“I doubt there was hanky-panky. Most biographers agree. No hanky-panky, no talk of marriage. Some initial infatuation, I’ll grant you that—particularly on Brahms’s end—but the relationship was never a physical one. The question, of course, is why.”

Hart was shaking his head. “There is
always
hanky-panky.”

“You have to consider how Clara was raised. She was very much her father’s daughter: proper, concerned with appearances. Also, she was quite naive. She’d fallen in love with Robert as young as fifteen or thirteen, depending on how you interpret things. Even if she’d had feelings for Brahms, she might not have fully understood them.”

“Please.”

“In her diary, she writes about feeling like Brahms’s mother, about taking on that role after his own mother dies. And Brahms had been both beloved and esteemed by Robert. Clara could have been simply continuing a friendship he’d encouraged, even from the asylum.”