Longing (34 page)

Feeling instantly that he had met a man who, among all men, would best understand him, Robert said, “I trust I am not imposing upon your good will and the brevity of our acquaintance if I invite you to Clara Wieck's birthday party as our guest of honor.”

“Oh, Fräulein Wieck. That would be a great pleasure. I met her in Paris several years ago, though I doubt she'd remember me, for I was suffering at the time from a most incautious haircut. She was just a child then, as I recall, and certainly had not attained the renown that now attaches to her name. How old will she be at this birthday we shall be celebrating together?”

“Sixteen,” said Robert, smiling hugely.

After a dinner of smoked salmon and cold cucumber soup and roast duck with apple-sausage stuffing and potato dumplings and red cabbage braised with vinegar—the entire meal, which lasted the good part of the afternoon, accompanied by and washed down with copious amounts of champagne—all that remained were the toasts and the music.

Her father praised her talent and her yet-to-be-realized stupendous income.

Dr. Reuter proclaimed her now a woman, which made her father look at him as if he wanted to snatch his cigar out of his imprudent mouth.

Wilhelm Ulex admired her dress.

Louis Rakemann, who was a good enough musician to have been rehearsing with Clara for a performance of Bach's D-Minor Concerto and a poor enough judge of character to imagine that she might care for him as much as he cared for her, said, “My desires for you are no less than my desires for myself. Long life. Good music. And a husband worthy of your gifts.”

“Thank you for informing us, Louis, that one of your desires is for a husband,” said Julius Knorr, inspiring great amusement in all but Rakemann.

Knorr, who by that time had put his foot up on the table, leaned forward to remove it with both hands, rose unsteadily, and made his own toast: “If I played the piano half as well as you, I'd be twice as far away from here than I am,” which Clara, kindly, took to mean that since he was here and nowhere else, he was doubly pleased to have been asked to her party and to have been given the opportunity to make peace with Robert, whom Julius had threatened to take to court until Robert had paid him twenty-five thalers for his interest in the magazine.

Some others, however, did not interpret Knorr's words so charitably and told him to sit down, which he did with such haste that he left some of his champagne dancing briefly by itself in the air before it drizzled down quite scrupulously into the glass that had abandoned it.

Felix Mendelssohn said, “I came to Leipzig not to direct the music of the orchestra but to be directed to Heaven by the music in you.”

When all had toasted her but Robert, and Clara had excused his silence by reminding herself that when there was music boiling up inside him he sometimes seemed to neglect to speak as a chef forgets to eat, he suddenly pushed back his chair and stood up with a glass of champagne in each hand. “I have known Clara Wieck since she was eight years old, half her life ago. When first I met her, all I could see was her music. Today, all I can hear is her beauty. In the time between, she has grown more charming every day, every hour, within as well as without. She has made me laugh. She has made me weep. But most of all she has made me grateful. To have been put on Earth at the same time as she is to have been given a gift that only God and chance could provide. And it is a gift shared by all of us here today—to live in her time, to live in her company, to live within sight and sound of her. There is no one in the world like her, and no world is like ours in its being blessed by her presence. I drink to her twice: in admiration; in affection.”

Robert emptied first one glass of champagne, then the other. She saw that both his hands were trembling, but not enough to match the trilling of her heart and the shiver in her spine.

All the other men at the table drank to her as well with a glass in each hand, except for her father, who leaned against her and whispered, “He is drunk.”

“So am I,” she replied, though her glasses were full.

From there, all retired to the largest of the music rooms, the men with cigars and brandy, she with her gold watch and what was left of a plum tart she cupped in her hand within a linen napkin. Everyone asked her to play the piano, but she graciously ceded the bench and pride of first place to Mendelssohn, who was not only her distinguished guest but whose piano playing she knew wholly by reputation and preferred to experience by sound before she undertook to perform in his presence. Whether inspired by fear or merely example, a pianist flew higher in the draft of other, earlier birds.

To rid his fingers of both torpidity and the suasions of champagne, Mendelssohn wreathed through some Bach fugues, much to Robert's delight, and then, to the delight of all, through improvisations in the styles first of Chopin and second of Liszt. When Clara begged him to play his own music, Mendelssohn began with what seemed a deliberate echo of his previous beginning, a fugue of his own in E minor, which crescendoed and accelerandoed to a huge false climax before subduing itself in a quiet iteration of the fugue theme with, at the very end, so unexpected a diminuendo on a rising scale that Clara rose from her chair. All the others in the room followed her example, mistaking her powerlessness before this music for mere admiration of it.

Mendelssohn seized the opportunity of her standing to invite her to join him at the piano. He placed before them the piano part of his BMinor Capriccio, and together they played it, he from memory and she by sight, but he no better than she, because he guided her somehow, with the flow of his body and the occasional pressure of his shoulder against hers and every once in a while a kind of anticipatory hum she knew no one else could hear, a pretty little snatch of song that made her giddy.

He took her hand when they were done and pulled her to her feet. Then he drew her forward so that, from his greater height, she was forced into a mighty bow before her friends and her father, all of whom applauded her and him and called for more.

“You'll get no more from me,” Mendelssohn addressed them. “For me to play with her is like a pig in a race with an antelope. While I grunt in the mud, she takes wing like an angel to the heavens. So please, my friends, allow me to join you at the trough while together we feed on such ambrosia as might fall from her fingers.”

They all laughed at his exaggerated graciousness, and then again when Julius Knorr shouted, “That doesn't sound terribly kosher to me.”

“What will you play?” Mendelssohn asked her.

“What would you like me to play?”

“Something you love.” Mendelssohn then turned from her and looked around the room, as if for music floating in the air. “Something by him.” He pointed at Robert.

“Something I love,” she said, and nearly added,
by someone I love
.

She played Robert's new Sonata in F-sharp minor, which he had sent to her only a few days earlier accompanied by a note saying he had been inspired by a melody of hers
*
and that at the same time this piece was a cry of his
heart for
her. She had wanted to tell him it was her heart that belonged to him, but her father had insisted upon providing her words of gratitude and had dictated to her the note he insisted she send back: “Thank you for the sonata. I look forward to finding the time to play it someday.”

This was the time.

*
It was when Mendelssohn was sixteen that Heinrich Dorn, not long thereafter to become Robert's teacher, played for Felix one of Dorn's own compositions. They did not meet again for another sixteen years, at which time Mendelssohn played for Dorn that very same piece, which Dorn did not recognize and had no memory of having written. Mendelssohn, who had not even played it before this moment, knew it perfectly. He absorbed music into his memory the way other men did long-ago moments of love.

*
Not many years hence, Mendelssohn would attend the University of Berlin, where he would hear his former contributor lecture on the aesthetics of music. It is not known whether during those lectures Hegel said what later (not long before the cholera epidemic of 1831 carried him off) he wrote with such authority that his words continue to this day to echo in the minds of all humanity: “The fundamental character of the romantic is the musical.”

*
Her “Scène fantastique.”

Leipzig

OCTOBER 4, 1835

I do not regard
Carnaval
as music
.

Frédéric Chopin

When Clara and her father and Robert returned from a long afternoon walk, during which not a word was spoken because of Friedrich Wieck's insistence that such walks were for exercise and that the tongue was the only part of the body a pianist didn't need to strengthen, they found Felix Mendelssohn sitting in the drawing room of the Wieck house. There was a man beside him, but he didn't get up to greet them when Mendelssohn did.

Clara recognized him immediately. In the three years since she had leapt over his back in Paris, he had become perhaps the most revered pianist in Europe; if Franz Liszt were more renowned, this was owed not entirely to his playing. He had also, she saw, become both more beautiful and more pallid, his eyes weary and yet almost desperately lucent.

He reached out his hand toward her. “
Now
I remember you,” he said in his heavily accented French. “Please forgive my not rising both to the occasion and to yourself—I am not as strong as I was when last you saw me and we frolicked.”

“Monsieur Chopin,” she said. He no longer smelled sweet; perhaps he had not played the piano in a while. His hand felt strangely small. She wondered why the critic Rellstab had said that if you were going to play Chopin's études you'd best have a surgeon by your side. She had played enough of them to know that as long as you were willing to break some chords, you needn't break your hand.

“He came all this way to hear you play,” said Mendelssohn.

“Splendid,” said Wieck. “I hope you won't mind if we tell others of this honor,” he said to Chopin. “And may I assume we are your only stop in Leipzig?”

“Hardly,” said Chopin. “First I picked up Mendelssohn and then we went to the Voigts.”

“You stopped at the Voigts before—,” began her father, who seemed even more offended than he had been in Paris when Chopin had declined to receive the two of them in his home.

Chopin seemed to know instinctively how to deal with her father's anger, for he dared to interrupt him. “And considering the fact that we waited here more than an hour for your daughter, we should have gone to see someone else in the meantime. Besides, sir, what does it matter in what order one visits people? In Paris, the one seen last is the one seen longest.”

“Then may I assume we are your last stop in Leipzig?”

“If it is, sir, it will be because your daughter proves to be as talented as you are proving to be tedious. And in bad French, no less.”

Chopin smiled and seemed to enjoy the sight of her father's reddening face. At the point at which it looked as if it might explode, Chopin looked away toward Robert. “And who is this quiet boy over here?”

Clara was worried Robert might find this condescending. Yet he
was
a boy. Though only two or three months older than Robert, Chopin seemed to bear the weight of both fame and experience; the world and his work had made him weary. Robert was robust with possibility and restlessness. Even his smile at Chopin's notice of him was guileless.

“This is Schumann,” said Mendelssohn, in a tone that indicated he had spoken of him to Chopin.

Again, Chopin did not rise. Rather, he seemed to sink back farther into his chair. “Ah, yes. The one who so praised my Mozart variations that I was barely able to compose anything else for months, so intimidated was I by such undigested praise.”

“Thank you,” said Robert. “It is such an honor—”

“I am not sure you should thank me. I am not sure what I said was intended as a compliment. For your dithyramb struck me, I must say, as remarkably silly. Which is to say, you made of my rather straightforward variations some kind of phantasmagoric tableau. Don Juan does not gambol about with Leporello in my music. Nor does he kiss Zerlina at all, let alone on something so specific as a D-flat. And if you knew me better—which I hope you shall—you would know I have so little experience with women that I wouldn't even know where to find a woman's D-flat.”

Robert laughed. “Well, if you need any advice in that regard—I mean where to find the D-flat on a woman, though I strongly recommend you begin with her A-natural—I'm your man.” He chuckled again.

Chopin could not resist a smile at encountering this appreciation of his little joke. It was not a broad smile—his face was too contained for that—but it fully brightened his eyes above the hammocks of darkness on which they languidly rested.
*

“I do not tell stories in my music, Monsieur Schumann,” he said with far less exasperation, almost with a kind confessional friendship. “My music relates to nothing but itself. And whatever drama it contains, it is the drama of the next notes first and of all the notes together finally. It is the drama of harmony, in which the villain is dissonance and the hero is most often the same. I don't read books. I certainly don't read magazines. And the only theater I enjoy is the opera, which I attend solely for the music. To hear Pasta in
Otello
or Malibran in the
Barber
or Cinti-Damoreau in my poor Bellini's
Beatrice
is to experience not drama but song. It just happens that I find my own voice in the piano. When I sing—and all I do is sing—it comes out of that wooden box. I only hope I'll still be able to sing when I'm
in
a wooden box.”

“So you too think of death?” said Robert.

“How nice to find we have something in common,” answered Chopin.