Longing (25 page)

APRIL 3, 1834

Once you were my feminine beloved
,

Now you are my masculine beloved
.

Robert Schumann

Though it was the evening of the publication day of the first issue of
New Journal of Music
, and their colleagues in the magazine were no doubt celebrating at The Coffee Tree, Robert was home with no one but Ludwig Schunke for company.

They had moved together to 21 Burgstrasse, on the ground floor in deference to Robert's continuing fear of heights, about which Ludwig had commented only half ironically, “It's not the fear of heights, but the fear of depths, that makes a man tedious.”

Schunke had appeared several months before at Krause's Cellar, out of nowhere, “like a star,” as Robert was to write in the magazine, though he had arrived, as it were, from everywhere, also like a star to those whose feet are fixed in mundane soil. Plagued by consumption, told to prepare himself to die, he had left Paris, where he was considered a pianist the equal of Liszt and Chopin, at the very end of the cholera scare, only when it was healthy to remain, and then tried Vienna, Prague, Dresden, and finally here, Leipzig, where he fell in with the boys of David and moved in with Robert.

For the first time in his life, Robert had found himself part of a circle of friends, not merely the solitary companion of another solitary dreamer. They met regularly in one tavern or another to discuss art in general and their plans for a new music magazine in particular. They sometimes called themselves Davids, because they agreed they were united against the Philistines and because they were taken, for one reason or another—aesthetic, carnal, or merely metaphysical—with the image of “a goodly-to-look-at boy of beautiful countenance” (so many musicians were homely little men with large ears) who was also a “cunning man with a harp.” Perhaps they would agree, should a poll be taken, that a woman's form was most desired; but a man's was most admired.

While a student at Heidelberg, Robert had heard the term
Philister
applied by his fellow academics to the townspeople in the customary way in which those being educated insist upon demeaning those who have the misfortune to abide within earreach of that education. For Robert and his friends, however, the Philistines had become those who did not merely dwell in but ruled the world of music, of art, of everything in which men expressed themselves and sought to win approval by appealing to the admiration for superficial vulgarity that was surely man's greatest failing. Yet Robert was embarrassed by such blatant biblical symbolism. He preferred to think of himself and his group only as simple warriors, not kinged, and if named at all, named something playful and obscure.

He always made it a point to sit next to Johann Lyser, a deaf artist who was convinced that his drawings of their Leipzig meetings in Krause's Cellar or The Coffee Tree would one day assume the eminence of Titian's
Last Supper
_;
not the painting from the 1540s, in which nearly everyone seems intent upon listening to a pontificating and, to Lyser, mundanely divine Jesus, but the one finished twenty years later in which several discussions are being carried on at once and Jesus, like Robert, is the doomed spiritual leader who comforts with his silence and, as upon Lyser's own back with the hand not holding a glass of beer, the occasional touch.

Robert enjoyed the sensation of watching the chaos of their gatherings become the imperturbation of art. Every once in a while Lyser halted the fricative twitter of his pen on paper and looked sideways into Robert's eyes and directed them toward his drawing.

Here was the pianist Julius Knorr in all his theological, Mephistophelian grandeur, black beard, twisted black cigar, leaning back in his chair so his clubfoot in its peculiar black boot might find room on the table among the dozens of beer glasses and champagne flutes and ale tankards and coffee cups and ashtrays and books and coins and snow-soaked scarves and hats, his pale face as coyly expectant of reward as when he had within the last hour quoted Stendhal on romanticism as the progenitor of art that gives people the most profound pleasure and classicism as the progenitor of art that gives the most profound pleasure to their great-grandfathers. It was Knorr who, Clara's claims notwithstanding, had been the first in Germany to play Chopin's Variations on
“Là ci darem,”
a fact that Robert had bribed Knorr with a box of Caribbean cigars never to reveal to her.

Here, in contrast, was Karl Banck, blond, evilly handsome, who wrote songs and then sang them himself, distressingly well. Banck had been hired by Wieck to work with Clara. For some reason he always seemed to be singing with Clara whenever Robert visited. Robert found this annoying not because he suspected that the love songs they sang together were being sung to one another but because he himself did not sing well at all. He felt shut out by their art, not to mention the fact that they went right on singing even when he popped his head into the room Banck sometimes lodged in, the very room over Reichstrasse that had been Robert's own in those days when Clara would sit beside him silently as he wove the two of them together within the detours of his improvisations.

Here was Joseph Mainzer, who actually had been a priest and then became a revolutionary and finally a teacher of voice.
*
Robert wished it were Mainzer and not Karl Banck who had been hired to work with Clara, for he was so jovially homely that he claimed to have quit the priesthood because he found he didn't need a vow of chastity in order to be forced to practice it.

Here was Ludwig Böhner, at one time so famous a composer that he was the actual model for Hoffmann's Johannes Kreisler, who by now had been brought so low by drink he could barely dress himself; and yet he had prevailed upon Robert's worship of Hoffmann to have himself named the magazine's “foreign correspondent,” prepared to travel, he said, wherever the beer is best and the music impetuous.

And here, among all the rest of these arguing, table-pounding, music-worshipping, iconoclastic, Christmas-fat romantics, was Friedrich Wieck himself, progressive in the ear—he admired the music of Beethoven and Schubert if not quite yet that of Chopin—and retrograde in the heart, with the result that he was that most dangerous of aesthetes, an avant-garde bourgeois.

Yet all of them believed with Schiller that if man were ever to solve the problem of politics in actual practice, he would have to approach it through the problem of the aesthetic, because it was only through beauty that man made his way to freedom. It was not the beauty of the merely decorous or genial. It was the beauty of darkness illuminated. The artist, in Friedrich Hölderlin's words, rejoiced in flinging himself into the night of the unknown, as Hölderlin himself seemed to have done in having entered the insane asylum in Tübingen almost thirty years ago.

In the true artist, art and life were one, as in time past and as was their goal for time present, the poet and the priest were one, according to Novalis. This was at the center of their beliefs: the
self
, conscious, creative, munificent to the degree of profligacy, and most of all visible, tangible, inarguably unique, inarguably free, and, in those whose natures had become sufficiently refined, sublimely expressive.

At the end of the last century, a group of men, not unlike themselves, came to be known as
Die Romantik
, among them Novalis and Hölderlin and Eichendorff; Tieck and Wackenroder, the latter of whose death at the age of twenty-four kept the heart of the former shattered for the remaining fifty-five years of his life; and the younger of the Schlegel brothers, Friedrich,
*
who on the one hand carried forward the Johann Winckelmann tradition in extolling the “smooth, tight, marble-hard” male body and on the other quite betrayed that tradition by seducing Felix Mendelssohn's Aunt Dorothea into leaving her Jewish husband and wrote a novel that described their sexual relations in the most intimate terms, including Dorothea's desire to experience her passion in positions they had not known a woman could imagine, let alone assume. Had not Dorothea herself been so unutterably plain, she and her lover (later wife and husband, after she had “converted”) might well have epitomized Théophile Gautier's romantic ideal of the beautiful, the free, and the young.
**

It had been a glorious time, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, when the rights of man and the emancipation of the artist coalesced to produce what Joseph Eichendorff considered an inner regeneration of collective life.

Yet in how short a time did the profundities of self-expression lead to the superficialities of commercialism. What Schubert called “wretched, fashionable stuff” predominated. The great mystery facing mankind was not why all fashionable stuff was wretched but why so much wretched stuff was fashionable. Artistic standards were abandoned, the comfortable cult of the mediocre prevailed, and presentation became confused with substance.

In consequence, society itself was weakened, corrupted, and desolated: When art is trivialized and debased, the resulting devastation makes war and famine and plague and natural catastrophe seem negligible. It is one thing to die individually or to be wiped out en masse. It is another and far more grievous thing entirely to be forced to live in a time of squalid art.

Nowhere was this more evident than among pianists, who allowed themselves to become so celebrated for their technique that they were forced to write their own music simply to find pieces showy and empty enough to play, with the result that those called the greatest musicians of their time were also held to be the greatest composers of all time: Henri Herz, Franz Hünten, even the young Sigismond Thalberg.

It was enough to tempt one to destroy his hand. And Robert was to some of these men—Wieck as his former piano teacher being the primary dissenter, and Dr. Reuter not far behind—a hero for that act. They interpreted his act as a symbolic gesture, but hardly empty, given the pain involved and the ruination of a brilliant career. He had confronted the Philistines and had slung the potent, smooth stone deep within his own brain. Who better to lead them?

Otto Nicolai, back from too long a visit to the Teatro La Fenice in Venice to understand how a magazine might save the world, not to mention accomplish so impossible a task as to exalt a Schubert over a Pixis, asked Robert how he thought music could be written about in the first place, words and music being so antithetical.

“I learned more about counterpoint from Jean Paul than from anyone else,” said Robert. “A painter can learn color from a Beethoven symphony, and a musician can learn rhythm from a Goethe poem.”

“But how can music be described in words?” said Nicolai.

“Much like this cigar”—Robert waved his—“if you have the capacity to appreciate it.” He put the cigar between his beer-washed, chastity-plumped lips and drew from it a huge mouthful of smoke, which he released in a stream through his mouth and drew back into his head through his nose. “Of course, should we find ourselves sucking upon one that's foul, we'll call it such. If you can't attack what's bad about a work, then you can't defend what's good about it. So let us drink to the dawn of a new poetic age.”

As they toasted, Ludwig Böhner lost nearly all his drink as he missed bashing his stein against Joseph Mainzer's. But even as he licked what beer he could from his saturated sleeve, he asked Robert, “Surely you have not chosen words over music?”

Robert shook his head. “Literature interprets us, but music defines us.”

“Brilliant!” It was an unfamiliar voice, deep and somewhat rasping, as if something had eaten away at it, and to Robert's musician's ear sounding the way he had always imagined Weber's voice after he had swallowed the acid. It had come from a strange young man, a new young man, tall, thin, with huge curls rising from his high forehead to swim back over his raised collar and snow-dusted crimson scarf, a trim mustache atop a wide, smiling mouth, a glorious thin nose hooked like something off an ancient statue, and eyebrows hovering delicately over eyelids almost swollen with intelligence. Who can this be? thought Robert. He must be the one they'd been waiting for.

“Ludwig Schunke from Stuttgart,” he softly introduced himself to the table.

From the moment Ludwig had appeared at Krause's Cellar, everyone had admired him.

Some thought he looked like John the Baptist. Others claimed he resembled the kind of idealized Roman emperor who might be dug up at Pompeii.

Robert could not disagree but displayed his erudition in stating that Ludwig most reminded him of Thorwaldsen's bust of Schiller, though privately he saw, when he looked at Ludwig, a man with the beauty of Bernaert van Orley as painted by Dürer, hat cocked, mouth voluptuous, eyes on eternity, and hair of such inviting, shining softness that it tempted one to put one's hands within it, on either side of Ludwig's head, and bring his face so close it could not be distinguished from one's own.

He bestowed upon Ludwig as his Davidite
New Journal of Music
pseudonym the name Jonathan, for Ludwig had immediately become his best friend in the world and in becoming his Jonathan had made sense for him finally of the whole notion of the fight against the Philistines and his own assumption of the kingdom of, and as, David.

Robert had joked with Ludwig that as Davidites they lead off the first issue of
New Journal of Music
with a pledge to deliver to its audience the foreskins of a hundred Philistines.
*
After they had amused one another in discussing drunkenly (Robert on Rhine wine, Ludwig on the bitter coffee with which he tried to acidify his disease to death) just what the foreskins of Herz and Hünten might look like, they settled more seriously on a message declaring their aim to be to deliver the poetry of art to a place of honor among men.

Robert and Ludwig lived their belief. They immersed themselves completely in their work, and did not drown in the madness of it only because they rescued one another from the abstraction of composition and the austerity of the endless repetition necessary for the illusion of spontaneity.