Longing (51 page)

Liszt, who had in his hotel room worn nothing more ornate than black pants and boots and an open white shirt, had come to Mendelssohn's party dressed like a Magyar prince, his colorful waistcoat topped against the March chill by a long, pleated pelisse trimmed at the collar and cuffs with mink. He kept this coat draped over his shoulders until he was persuaded to take to the piano where, in keeping with his outfit, he would play a Hungarian folk song, “prepared especially for you,” he said to Mendelssohn as he removed his gloves finger by finger and then with his pale bare hands placed them on the piano so that they hung lifelessly over its edge like a magic fluted carapace from which all energy has been absorbed.

It seemed a simple tune, barely the sort to which one might picture princes dancing with common damsels by the River Tisza. When he'd finished, Liszt nodded modestly toward Mendelssohn, who raised his hands before his breast as if he might applaud. Before Mendelssohn could bring his hands together, Liszt held up one of his own, tossed his hair so that it rose from his shoulders halfway up his head, and began to play, before his hair had fallen back, a variation on his tune so dramatic in its distension of simplicity that Robert heard a single breath sucked in and bled out from the many people in that room. He also heard the clink and clank of medals worn by Liszt around his neck, as he swayed back and forth on the piano bench, nostrils quivering, lips vellicating, eyes going nearly all the way back in his head, which lent his perpetual smile, directed sweepingly and uninterruptedly at his entire audience now, a rather macabre aspect, though most of the women in the room appeared quite entranced by so maniacal a visage, their excitement growing in direct relation to the proportion of white that showed in those eyes that went right on smiling through a full four variations on the original theme, each more complex than the last.

When he was finally done, Liszt brought his quavering body slowly to rest, closed his eyes, and touched, as had become his habit since its bestowal, the Golden Spur given him by Pope Pius IX. Before recovering his gloves, Liszt kissed the finger that had touched the medal, a gesture Robert realizes should have forewarned him of what he has heard of Liszt's growing dissatisfaction with the things of this temporal world with which he has been so munificently and unsatisfyingly rewarded.

“Your turn.”

Robert, who was standing with Clara as close as he could get to his dear friend and host, Mendelssohn, feared Liszt was talking to him. All he could think, upon being asked to follow Liszt to the keyboard, was to beg Liszt to kiss
his
finger now, his poor, damaged digit that had pointed his way to where he was, a composer who could not play his own music.

But it was Mendelssohn who responded: “This evening is for
you
. Tonight we honor
you
. I have no plans to play. I have prepared nothing to play.”

“What you are not prepared to play is better than what the rest of us play with preparation,” Liszt graciously averred. “And if you do play,” he added with what was now the gracelessness of a bribe, “I shall pledge to perform once more for your pension fund and for your uncultured, intransigent Leipzigers.”

Though most of those in attendance were precisely the Leipzigers to whom Liszt referred, they were nearly as one in urging their host to give in to the blandishments of his guest of honor.

“Very well,” Mendelssohn addressed Liszt. “I shall play. But you must promise not to become angry with me. As I said, and as may become clear to you in a moment, what I shall play I have not prepared to play.”

Robert was as intrigued by Mendelssohn's puzzling disclaimer as he was relieved to have discovered that it was not him but Mendelssohn to whom Liszt proposed to turn over the piano. As Liszt rose from the bench, seeming to forget to claim his gloves in his haste to make room for Mendelssohn and to light up one of the nasty Roman cigars he favored over the elegant, fragrant Habanos he could easily have afforded, Robert determined that the only music Mendelssohn might play that he had not prepared to play would have to be improvised. Because anything Mendelssohn had played once, he was prepared to play again.

Mendelssohn sat down. He raised his hands above the keyboard and was about to bring them down when his eyes moved slowly toward Liszt's gloves hanging over the edge of the piano. He cowered. The gloves intimidated him. Liszt might as well have let his hands themselves remain on the piano. But the gloves were warning enough: Let no pianist follow Liszt to the piano. What piano? As Heine had written of Liszt's playing, “The piano vanishes…music appears.” The lesson of Thalberg should be sufficient: There was only one pianist in the world.
(Then
—Princess Belgiojoso had never been granted the privilege of hearing Clara.)
*

Mendelssohn did the unthinkable. He reached out toward Liszt's gloves and touched one of them with the tip of a finger and brought that finger to his lips and kissed it.

Thus did Mendelssohn become Liszt. He smiled broadly. He pushed back the bench to attain the exact angle of Liszt's attack. He raised his chin. He even tried to toss his hair, but it was thick, dark, Jewish hair and could not wave like Liszt's, it hardly moved at all, so that Mendelssohn once more postponed his playing by putting a hand behind his neck and moving his hair up and down, up and down, quite like the classicist attempting one of the signal flourishes of the romantics.

Only then did he play.

He played every note Liszt had played. First the simple Hungarian folk song. Then each variation upon it, not only note for note but gesture for gesture. All that was missing were the sound of Liszt's medals, since Mendelssohn wore nothing more around his neck than a fine cravat, and the undiluted whites of Mendelssohn's eyes.

When Mendelssohn played the final chord of the fourth variation, he managed somehow to cause Liszt's gloves to drop off the piano. They grasped one another as they fell and landed palm to palm.

So did Liszt cause his own hands to meet, again and again, clearly appreciative of, and unoffended by, this masterful parody of his every exaggeration and, even more intimidating, the perfect recapitulation of his every dazzling note.

Indeed, when all sat down to the dinner in Liszt's honor, Liszt could not stop speaking of Mendelssohn's feat and proclaimed that Mendelssohn played Liszt better than Liszt played Liszt. Mendelssohn then toasted him and told the story of how, years ago, he and Liszt had been in Paris at the same time and he had shown Liszt the manuscript of his piano concerto and Liszt had taken the manuscript immediately to the piano and played the whole piece through, more beautifully than Mendelssohn had imagined it could have been played and more beautifully than it had been played since by anyone. “It was an absolute miracle,” said Mendelssohn.

“You are the miracle,” said Liszt, who then toasted Mendelssohn.

When he had completed his toast, and all had drunk to their host, who was, without question, the greatest musician among them, Liszt poured more wine from the decanter into his glass, raised high his glass once more, and said, “A toast, as well, to Robert Schumann, as new a friend to me as he is no doubt an old friend to most of you. Of his musical intelligence there can be no doubt—no greater critic writes in any language, or any language I can read. Yet his true and greater genius is to be found not in what he writes of other musicians but in what music he himself writes. I cannot always play it. I cannot always understand it. If for no other reason than those, it must be superior! Let us drink, ladies and gentlemen, to one who says few words and yet expresses himself to a degree that would be shameful in one less gifted and less profound.”

Robert felt himself turn blood red as all about the table glasses were raised by his Leipzig friends and his new friend from Paris by way of Hungary and by the woman next to him, his Clara, in whose loving eyes he felt reborn, so easy was it to find redemption in praise.

But she continued not as happy with Liszt as Robert was. “He did not play
Carnaval
to your advantage or to my satisfaction.” She rubbed the cuff of his sleeve between her thumb and forefinger, so that her little finger moved against the skin on the back of his hand, splayed around the bottom of his wineglass. “Everything about him is so agitated, so restless. I don't know how anyone could stand to be around him for very long. He doesn't make the same impression upon me that he did in Vienna. And look at him—he flirts outrageously. A man who looks like him should not flirt. It's an insult to the women who are drawn to him against their wills. He seduces the seduced. One might as well hang the dead.”

It did not help Liszt in Clara's eyes that he had arrived in Leipzig just in time to rescue her from the aftermath of childbirth, Marie but two months old and Clara restless. As Robert had bestowed upon his wife their first child, Liszt presented her his Hexameron Variations on Bellini's “Suoni la tromba.” He had written it for two pianos, one to be his, the other hers. So together they played it at the Gewandhaus, overwhelming, on the same program, the premiere of Robert's own D-Minor Symphony.

“Don't be sad,” she consoled him, cradling his head in the crook of her arm, as was her custom when he was, or she imagined him, in pain.

“I'm not.”

“Or angry.”

“Only with myself. The winds need work. But I do like that trombone phrase I took from the Schubert symphony. I remember seeing it on the floor of his brother's apartment and thinking,
Nice trombone
.”

“
Very
nice trombone.”

“You tamed him.”

“It's impossible to tame him. I almost hate Liszt as a composer. And I
do
hate him as a pianist. His music is a chaos of dissonance that follows the most tiresome introductions. His bass rumbles, his treble clangors.”

“And his eyes…they roll like those of Italian singers who cause one to worry whether artistic passions might give way to some other. And then they go white! I could see this as he played his
Lucia
Fantasy. But not when he played with you. When he looked at you, his eyes were where his eyes were meant to be. So perhaps you did tame him after all. With you before him, he could not, for once, look only to himself. You should be flattered. And I jealous.”

“Were I flattered, then you might well be jealous. Have you no idea, dear Robert, why he turns up his eyes that way?”

“I thought it was the passion of the moment.”

“It's passion, all right.” She laughed. “Or his representation of it. He does it for the ladies. It drives them to distraction.”

“It is hardly attractive. It makes him look like a
ghoul
.”

“It makes him look like a man at the moment of release.”

“Release?”

“Release.”

How would she know, unless she'd seen it in himself?

“Do my eyes…?” he asked.

“Do mine?” she asked back.

From the day they were married and moved into their first home together, at 5 Inselstrasse in Leipzig, he had withdrawn into her, leaving the world behind. What need for the world, when he had her? So accustomed had he become to hiding with her for a night or two—in bedrooms in Dresden, Berlin, Altenburg, Schneeberg—that he is not sure he ever truly accepted the luxury of what would have been her absolutely constant presence had she not begun again to go out on tour. He had so desired to possess her that he'd had no idea how much more he would desire her once he did possess her.

He'd longed for her when they were apart. Once they were together always, and he might satisfy his longing when he wished, his longing only grew. It was a desire not merely to enter her but somehow to envelop her while at the same time to find himself contained, wholly, within her. To confront her flesh was like a confrontation with her music, layer after layer, veils of recondite intoxication, and to lift them one by one was to find revealed something always different from what he had expected. He often could not sleep and did not want to sleep, or at least resisted sleep, hearing music in his head—not yet the music that would torment him—and watching Clara as she slept, placing his face in the way of her breath, studying her closed eyes to read her dreams upon her lids and to feel them in the quickening of her breathing.

It was, he was to learn in time as the father of four daughters, like watching a child sleep. No matter how urgently or cunningly or implacably he and Clara might have made love, her face, in sleep, revealed a renewal of innocence. Indeed, she had been made anew, to him, by marriage itself. He had expected to encounter, suddenly, a woman, a wife, whatever that might be, however tangibly and stalwartly she might assume a posture in his mind and in their home. But as a wife she was, at first, more a girl than she had been as girl. She sat with her legs beneath her, smiling at him for no reason beyond his presence. She wore her hair down even at the piano, as if she meant, in her abandon, to abandon it. She followed him from room to room, from her piano to his, so he was forced either to embrace her or to close the door against her. And still the walls were evilly thin, and he could hear her in the house, her footsteps, her breathing, her fingers in her hair.

Her piano.

Two artists of any kind, in one home, would prove a test, with their selfish hibernations and fragile moods. But when both can be heard, and when the sounds not only interrupt but beckon, the two must love or perish.

Now, when he would give anything to hear her play again, he remembers how he asked her not to play because he could not concentrate. Too often, he confessed in their diary, his songs were bought at the cost of her silence.

But it was Clara herself who urged him toward the symphony. “The piano is too small for you. It limits your fantasy. What you compose for it is orchestral. No wonder people can't fathom your work. It's too complex for one instrument.”