Longing (12 page)

He had never seen Wilhelm like this. Robert sensed he had come as a messenger of doom. He did not want news of further death, but neither did he want Wilhelm to stop looking as he did. He was pale and hollow-eyed so that the only color in his face was upon his lips, which seemed to have been bitten into red. It was a mask of anguish, which, should he never take it off, would leave him singularly blessed with the gift of eternal comeliness. Suffering was always the midwife to beauty.

Robert ceased playing at the very instant Wilhelm began to speak. It was as if they had rehearsed and the singer was now beginning his unaccompanied lament.

“I have terrible news. Schubert died of typhus last month in Vienna. Schubert is dead, and with him all that was brightest and most beautiful in our life.”
*

Robert's hands went over his ears. Emil, discovering it was too late to drop his book in what might be taken as a spontaneous reaction, tossed it gently and safely, but with a simultaneous cursing of God, across the room. Wilhelm closed the door behind him, shutting up within this small room all of what was surely at this moment the most intense grief being experienced anywhere by anyone.

“We must drink,” he said. “Where's the liquor?”

With his hands still over his ears, Robert said, “Dead?”

Robert did not wait for an answer before he put his hands down upon the keys of the piano and began to play Schubert's “Blessed World.”

As Robert played, the room turned black with night. Emil sat uneasily next to Wilhelm on the couch in order that they might share the bottle of brandy. The darkness became so complete that they spilled as much as they drank. Wilhelm seemed not to mind, but Emil began to think more of the cost of cleaning the couch than of the pleasure of having such a perfect excuse to get drunk, so he rose finally and lighted the oil lamp.

Robert's face was so wet from weeping as to suggest a membrane of moiré. His tears had even soaked through his cigar, leaving its wrapper heavy and wrinkled like an old man's skin and its burned-out coal an extinguished black blind shrunken eye.

Both boys went to him. This was dejection as they had never before seen. They had no words for it or for him, as Robert had no words for them. He seemed incapable of speech, only of the music he continued to play and the whispering glissade of his tears.

They tried to lift his hands from the piano, at first competing for possession of them both, until finally Wilhelm took one and Emil the other. But Robert fought them, without seeming to put forth any effort. They knew he was strong—each, in fact, venerated his broad shoulders and barrel chest—but neither knew he could resist them thus. His hands went on playing even as his friends grasped a wrist apiece and tried to separate him from the piece he was playing, which they recognized as “Der Erlkönig,” becoming more and more impassioned as the music gave forth the terrible story of the boy in his father's arms who is at first tempted and then threatened by the king of the elves.

Finally, as they continued to hold him, he finished the piece, whispering the final words—“the child in his arms was dead”—and his hands seemed to float away from the piano and to take them with him.

He rose. He turned toward the door to his bedroom. His tears now fell directly from his eyes to the floor and left their trail as he walked between his two friends, each of whom put an arm around his waist.

In his room, he fell backward upon his bed, and the boys lay down with him, one on either side. Each curled up against him and eventually fell asleep, while Robert wept the whole night long and still failed to drown either his sorrow or himself.

*
The street where Richard Wagner had been born some fifteen years earlier.

*
Winckelmann was succeeded in his naive innocence by Johann Lavater, the Swiss founder of physiognomics, who loved the preserved dead bodies (or at least their surviving representations) of ancient Greek boys and believed that the well-toned body is the outward manifestation of inner moral goodness. He also believed that we have all been magnetized by God and that to locate this magnetic force within ourselves is to put one's hand upon our divine organ, as it were.

*
Wilhelm Götte did not acknowledge that he was here quoting Schubert's friend Moritz von Schwind.

Leipzig

OCTOBER 4, 1829

I have wept only three times in my entire life:

when my first opera failed; when a turkey stuffed with

truffles fell overboard; when I heard Paganini
.

Gioacchino Rossini

Earlier that year, Niccolò Paganini, on his first tour of north Germany, had stopped in Leipzig on his way to Berlin. He was not booked to play Leipzig, but Friedrich Wieck, with Paganini's permission, tried to free up the Gewandhaus for a one-night stand. In this he failed. But when Paganini left for Berlin, he was followed by Wieck, who arranged for him to come back to Leipzig in the autumn and play not one but four concerts. “And by the way,” said Wieck, upon taking leave of Paganini, “when you are in Leipzig in October I trust you will do me the honor of listening to my daughter.” Paganini hooked one of his talon-like fingers into the bridge of his dark spectacles and pulled them down his nose so he could look at Wieck without the asylum of obscurity. “Violin?” he asked. “Piano,” answered Wieck. “Well, then,” said Paganini, shoving his glasses back up his nose and grinning in a bright and fetching way that Wieck would never have imagined his devilish features could align themselves, “since she is not competition and therefore will not rob me of my livelihood, the honor of listening to her will be mine.”

At the time Paganini arrived back in Leipzig, Clara had been composing music of her own and playing in public for almost two years, mostly in private homes like that of the Caruses, although she had also traveled to Dresden to appear at two court soirées hosted by Princess Louise and at a fund-raiser for the Dresden Institute for the Blind, and had performed her first concerto, Hummel's G major, to a private audience. She had even appeared at the Leipzig Gewandhaus; not, however, in official debut but merely as primo in Kalkbrenner's four-hand Moses Variations.

She had never played for anyone like Paganini. He was, her father told her, perhaps the greatest virtuoso, if not musician, alive. More important than that, he was the most famous. And what fame did for a musician, aside from making him rich, was to give him the power to make other musicians famous. And therefore rich. There were dozens of great virtuosi playing all over Europe, hundreds of wunderkinder, her age and even younger. What separated one from the other was not so much a question of talent—for how many among even the cosmopolitan public could discern with any subtlety the nuances of technique and interpretation?—as of reputation. And reputation was made through the stated opinions of those already famous. Therefore, she must play for Paganini. Therefore, she must dazzle him.

She was not at all nervous about this. The important relationship in music was between her and her piano, not her and her audience. It was the piano that received her body and through her body the transubstantiated body of the composer.

Even hearing Paganini play did not shake her confidence in herself.

She and her father went to the first of his Leipzig concerts. They sat in the audience with all the rest of their expectant neighbors, few of whom had heard Paganini play but all of whom knew his reputation. It was said of Paganini, and was being whispered now within Clara's hearing, that he had been born of the Devil or was at the very least in league with the arch fiend. That he could raise the dead with his playing. That he had labored for, as both musical director and lover, Napoleon's sister, the Princess of Lucca. That he had been in a Naples prison for twenty years for having murdered another of his mistresses, solitarily confined for that entire time with nothing but a chamber pot and a one-stringed broken violin, and of the two he used only the violin in all that time. That the strings of his favorite violin had been fashioned from the intestines of that same mistress, whom he had murdered not because she had been unfaithful but because she had yawned when he was playing, and upon pushing his knife into her guts he had said, “Sorry to bore you.”

As had been written of him, “You would as soon expect melody from a corpse,” and that is what he looked like as he seemed to float into the hall simultaneously with the raising of the curtain, which revealed dozens of golden candelabras in which burned what seemed like thousands of black candles. Their flames twisted in terror as Paganini drifted past them to the center of the stage, which at least proved he was made of matter and was not what he appeared to be, a skeletal wraith, though neither was he the romantically arrogant, curly-haired artist represented by Jean Ingres in the portrait of which Clara's father had given her a copy for her recent birthday, painted ten years ago, at the very time of her birth.

He wore a coat and vest so tight she could not imagine he could scratch an itch, let alone raise both violin and bow, and pantaloons so loose she could not keep from envisaging his private parts swinging like a bell and its clapper. All his clothing was as black as the candles, blacker than the blue-black glass in his spectacles, which sat atop his huge hooked nose like the lashless, dispassionate eyes of an insect. His skin, however, was pale, more yellow than white, which is how Clara imagined the dead must look, sickly rather than pure, his cheeks hollow as if they had never been fed, and his black hair growing long down his back the way the hair of the dead was said to grow long after the rest of the body was left looking…well, exactly like Paganini.

In one hand he held his violin and bow, in the other a pair of scissors. Clara thought, “I knew his hair was too long!” and wondered if he was actually going to cut it and perhaps throw the strands out into the audience for souvenirs, as a young pianist in Paris named Franz Liszt was said to throw his cigar butts to certain women in attendance at his concerts. But Paganini did not use the scissors to cut his hair. Holding his violin out before him like a magician attempting to display the incorruptibility of his props, Paganini severed three of its four strings, each of which gave one sharp and final cry of wretched music before trembling to death. The audience gasped, Clara recoiled out of sympathy for the pain being suffered even now by his poor mistress, and Paganini began to play, on that one G string, the “Witches' Dance.” Oh, what a trick it seemed, even the impossible production of what sounded like but could not be polyphony on that single string, as the severed strings whipped around his neck and head like long filaments of glass dipped in candlelight. If he went this far, she wondered, why did he not simply cut all four strings and then play?

But even that could not more have impressed the audience, which greeted the end of the “Witches' Dance” with an applause that would have been of greater suitability to a witnessing of the resurrection of the body of our Lord.

Paganini bowed. It was not a gracious bow, such as her father had taught her, a humble bow, and it did not appear directed to the audience so much as to his violin or to his own hands or to himself. He bowed the way she imagined a man with tight pants would upon lowering himself onto a chamber pot.

The audience might have applauded forever had it not been relieved of this effort by the arrival on the stage of a tiny, beautiful boy with golden hair who carried with him a properly stringed violin and exchanged it for the one Paganini had mutilated.

As he received the new violin from the small hands of the boy, Paganini smiled at him, smiled in such a way that Clara felt she had never been smiled at in her life, not by her father or her mothers or her brothers or by Herr Schumann himself, whose smile she most wanted to provoke. She envied that smile, and the man who was so at ease with his place in the world to be able to smile it, and the boy, whoever he might be, however lowly a servant or princely a prince, who was its recipient.

It was as if the boy had brought not only a violin but the beauty of music itself. For when Paganini played upon it, he played a rondo by Beethoven, and he played it with such feeling and with such control and with such knowledge of the music that Clara found herself weeping. From then until the end of the concert—despite Paganini's seeming inability to refrain from such tricks as dual-hand pizzicato and ricochet bowing and octave trills and double stops and the production of shimmering flageolet tones and what Clara could have sworn sounded like scordatura tuning, to say nothing of his getting his violin to bray and hoot and yelp like various animals and finally at the end of his encores to pronounce in what sounded like perfect Italian “buona sera,” which of course had nearly everyone in the audience shouting back, “buona sera”—she had tears in her eyes. What he did, it seemed impossible to do: And that is why her tears were both of wonder and of anger.

She slept that night with the image of him in her mind. She was to play for him the next morning, and if she lost any sleep, it was the consequence not of nervousness but of enthusiasm. She felt his equal, not in style, certainly, but in value. He had taught her something, he had even inspired her. But she would teach him something, too. She would inspire him, too. At the very least, she would dazzle him.

It was only when she and her father were shown into Paganini's sitting room at the Hôtel de Pologne that she became concerned. At the center of the room was a piano, and it was a miserable specimen: old and scarred and lopsided and dirty-keyed. Her father went over to it and shook his head and actually pinched his nostrils together with his thumb and forefinger while scrutinizing its innards.

At that moment, Paganini's servant opened wide a double door at the rear of the sitting room, and there appeared Paganini himself, coming out of what was clearly his bedroom, which Clara was pleased to observe was disastrously untidy, with clothes and peculiarly high, narrow shoes thrown everywhere and, most shocking of all, piles…heaps…nearly mountains of stuffed animals, whose brilliant colors contrasted peculiarly with the blackness of the clothes and shoes and whose very presence in Paganini's bedroom made Clara feel much better about the wretched piano on which she was supposed to impress Signor Paganini so he would utter such words as would please her father insofar as they could be used to spread her fame.