Longing (8 page)

But technique went only so far. To try both to teach and amuse her, in case she might finally respond to speech, he made up a jingle:

The first rule of the artist to defend

Is “Technique's no more than a means to an end.”

When mere technique controls the day,

Art will always waste away.

He thought it brilliant himself, but to judge from Clara's vacant expression at hearing it (if she could hear it at all), it was redundant. She seemed to know without having to be taught that she was training her hands to be able not simply to move them flawlessly upon the piano keys but to thrust them into the piano itself, without making a sound, and to hold the beating heart of that instrument within the opulence of her fingers.

As for the training of her ear, it was begun with her closing her eyes and her concentrating on the ears as organs of the body that could be exercised as much as could her fingers or her legs and lungs during the long, silent exercise-walks on which he took her to the wooded park at Zweinaundorf, east out of Leipzig. “The ear can be opened from within,” he would tell her, unsure whether she could hear him but knowing from the increasing looks of pleasure on her face when she listened to him play that she understood and that she was teaching herself how to capture music through the strengthening of her ear.

In the beginning, he would permit her to play only by ear. This allowed him to gauge her grasp of sound, which was all music was before it was written down, and her to listen to music rather than read it and to close her eyes if she wished and pretend her body was the piano and no one was permitted to draw pleasure from it but herself.

Once she learned to distinguish all the keys, major and minor, by ear, and to locate and practice triads and dominant sevenths with inversions in all keys as well, and to find the subdominant and dominant chords in each key and to modulate when she wanted or when he demanded from major and minor keys through the diminished seventh, by using the leading note of the dominant, she still was not given music to read but instead was encouraged to improvise and to compose her own pieces, which he taught her to write down and in so doing taught her to read music. He considered it very important to excite a student's mind and let it develop, not degrade it into a mere machine. She learned more than sixty short pieces by ear, which she could play in any key, in any style, and with the myriad cadences appropriate to the pieces themselves.

When she was ready to play from music set before her, he started her on Karl Czerny's Toccata, which most of his students couldn't play until much further into their studies. And for the improvement of her improvisation, which was expected of all pianists who performed in public, she studied Czerny's
Guide to the Art of Improvisation
.

And she sang.

He believed not so much that the human voice was the first great musical instrument, as the cliché had it, as that the piano was the first great voice created by humans, toward which all musical instruments had been striving since man first blew through a reed and banged together the bones of an enemy and the Greeks plucked kitharas and the Jews tongued trumps.

And nothing facilitated unaffected keyboard cantabile better than the singing voice itself. For him, the basis of all pianistic phrasing was song, with its natural rise and fall of tone, its breath points, its expressive accentuation. In each phrase, there was a center of gravity, to be located by the finger in the gut of the piano like a singer in her own belly.

Thus, the first sounds Friedrich Wieck heard his daughter make, from her body and not solely from the piano that she seemed to grip in her fingers like a hawk its prey, was in her imitating him in the simple E-flat major andantino duet that Pamina and Papageno sing about the blessing of love toward the end of the first act of
The Magic Flute:

In love abides life's greatest bliss.

Love guards the heart from life's abyss.

“You sing beautifully,” he said.

“Thank you, Papa,” she sang, and laughed, because she had meant to speak, and the words had come out as music.

He laughed as well. “You've been listening all along?”

“Not listening,” she managed to say with a bit less lilt in her voice. “Hearing.”

“Why have you not spoken before this, my child?”

“I was listening,” she answered.

“Sing,” he said, because he thought she was confused.

Clara's new piano had been made by Andreas Stein in Vienna. Friedrich Wieck enjoyed a profitable relationship with Stein and had no hesitation in selling his pianos, but between the two dominant schools of piano execution, the Viennese and the English, he preferred the latter.

The “bravura” school of Vienna, championed by Czerny, demanded that its piano have light action, so that, in the words of Hummel, “it may be played upon with ease by the weakest hand”; which is not to say that Clara, as young as she was, was weak of hand. The Viennese damping was perhaps more efficient than the English, for while the hammers of both were covered with leather, the Viennese were mounted on the key and not on the frame and were sometimes hollow and were always lighter, which allowed the pianist greater velocity, delicacy and roundness of tone, lambency, elegance, and, as Hummel also said, “every conceivable degree of light and shade.” It was no wonder that Mozart favored the Stein, which allowed his playing to “flow like oil,” as he boasted, though Friedrich was forced, alas, to take such description on faith, since he had been only six years old when Mozart died in 1791, thirty-four years ago and seeming an eternity.

Why did it seem an eternity? Beethoven! Beethoven played the piano from the “singing” school of England, founded by Clementi upon the instruments fashioned by the Erard brothers in Paris and especially John Broadwood in England itself. The English piano was heavier and deeper in touch, slower, more difficult to play. But what rewards there were for the effort! Beethoven had transformed the piano from a toy to a veritable bomb from which exploded the expression of his torment. Its sonority was staggering, the brilliance of its sound almost unendurably profound. It was no longer merely a musical instrument. It was an expression of being.

Wieck had heard Beethoven play. Not in some salon or draughty hall but in Beethoven's own rooms on the fourth floor of Pasqualati House (named for the court physician of Maria Theresa, whose son was so thrilled to become Beethoven's landlord that he unwisely did not demand from him a security deposit) on the Mölker Bastei in Vienna. It was one of more than thirty flats in which Beethoven would live during his thirty-five years in that city. Wieck, who prided himself on the orderliness of his own home, if for no other reason than to demonstrate to his students that art and anarchy were not synonymous, found Beethoven's distressingly squalid and, given his admiration for the art of its tenant, disillusioning. Clouds of moisture threatened the cracked ceiling. Ink-scabbed pens lay strewn upon a walnut secretaire. Worst of all, the piano was defamed by scrolls of dust upon the top and a brimming chamber pot beneath. Friedrich had gained entrance through the pretense of being a specialist in diseases of the ear and a manufacturer of hearing-aid devices. But Beethoven proved so deaf that Friedrich was not sure the composer even heard what he was there for. He simply pointed Wieck toward the only caned chair untenanted by tossed-off clothes or half-finished plates of food, ordered him to sit, and, explaining that he needed to drink to subdue the torment of his colic and the anarchy of his diarrhea, poured them both glass after glass of red wine, which was too good to have been Austrian and filled in the pockmarks on Beethoven's face with tiny pools of florid incandescence. Seemingly under the influence of the wine, Beethoven talked incessantly of how his housekeeper was torturing him, and his brothers cheating him, and the Viennese public demeaning him, and Ignaz Schuppanzigh disgusting him by swallowing his violin within the folds of his many chins, and the Leipzig Gewandhaus ignoring him, and democracy disappointing him, and Italian opera diminishing him, while German opera was boring him (he even made up on the spot a ribald poem that ended, “Catalani, Lablache, and the splendid Rubini / Are the only ones worthy of holding my wienie”), all the while rolling his eyes and pulling at his hair and calling Wieck “my good man, whoever you are” when he was not calling him “my savior.” Finally, Beethoven pushed himself out of his chair, spilling red wine all over his trousers, and sat down at his Broadwood, and with his eyes gazing heavenward improvised crystalline and charming melodies that to Wieck were all the more precious because he knew he was the only one in the room who could hear them.

He had come away from Beethoven both drunk and determined that the piano must be put back on the path Beethoven had forged and on which the world was afraid to tread. Through the piano, and the piano alone, came the voice of God to man, and the voice of man to God. And the music..the music had been changed forever by Beethoven. Yet no one but he had been able—no, others had been able, simply not willing—to hear it.

Clara, his precious daughter, his little genius, whom he possessed but who was possessed by more than he would ever possess himself, heard it. Her obliviousness to speech seemed to mask a passion for musical sound, as out of her own reticence grew an exquisite musical expressiveness. He did not expect her to be Beethoven. He did not
want
her to be Beethoven. One musician should influence another only up to the nearest boundary of the latter's singularity.

So let Beethoven have his Broadwood. Clara would have her Stein, because he had promised it to her once she learned all of Spohr's songs and Mozart's E-flat Major Concerto and because it suited her and because he knew that in the presence of such ability as hers he must be flexible. There is a natural conservatism among teachers of music, because music's rules require obedience. But music itself is a radical art and demands of its followers an insurrectionary bias. Therefore, he must be both tyrant and patron. It was not so much that his dreams for himself were wrapped up in his daughter—for he was a great success as a teacher if not entirely as a man—as his dreams for her were wrapped up in himself. He could only imagine what it must be like to be so gifted. He wanted her to experience her gift in its full flowering. He would be, thus, her gardener, no more, no less.

They sat together at the new piano.

“What would you like to play first?” he asked.

Without answering, she ran four octaves up and down of the B-flat minor scale, eschewing legato for the leap of her left ring finger off the G-flat.

He recited another of his verses:

The artist's first rule

Is “Technique is a tool.”

But your art suffers shame

If technique is your aim.

“You're not a very good poet, Papa.”

“Oh, really?”

“But you're a wonderful teacher.”

“Oh, really.”

“I love my new piano.”

“And well you should. It cost a fortune.”

“I'll pay you back someday.”

“Not someday. Now.”

She turned to him where he sat next to her at her new piano and put her hands on his knees and bunched up the cloth from his trousers within them.

“But I don't have any money.”

“The money will come in time,” he said. “What I want from you now, and why I bought you this new piano, is for you to begin to prepare to play for others.”

“But I'm too young.” She punctuated her words by hammering softly on his knees.

“Not young,” he answered. “Only inexperienced. At your age Mozart was a great success in Vienna. Music is more the emperor in Vienna than the emperor himself, and in Vienna more than half the concert musicians are under fourteen. What you must understand, Clara, is that music does not choose or need as its vessel some ancient pot. There are children who can play their instruments as if they were limbs on their bodies.”

She looked at the large, six-octaved piano before her and opened her huge eyes amusedly.

“You make me laugh,” he said. “Very few people make me laugh.”

“You make me make you laugh.”

He thought for a moment and then asked, “How do I do that?”

“By only pretending to be stupid.”

Now he didn't know whether to laugh or chasten her, and his very indecision forced him to laugh again.

“You see,” she said.

He put his arm around her. “If I could keep you to myself, I would. But God would never forgive me.”

“I'm not going to run off and get married that soon, Papa.”

He removed his arm and took her by both shoulders. “Listen to me, Clara. Girls are playing music all over Europe. One can't go anywhere without hearing of what Leopoldine Blahetka is performing in Vienna or Anna de Belleville in London and especially Marie Moke in Paris, Marie Moke, to whose playing it is said people are deaf because they are blinded by her beauty, which is as nonsensical as it is heretical.”

“No one will ever be blinded by my beauty,” said Clara, wiggling her shoulders so that he released her.

“Thank goodness,” said her father, celebrating the anniversary of his divorce with precisely the kind of insensitive remark that had sent his wife into the arms of another man. “What I'm telling you, Clara, is that these girls are older than you but started younger than you and that you are starting older than they but will be greater than they long before you are as old as they are now. They are not even your competition, though the world will judge them so at first. But your true competition will be the Moscheleses and Kalkbrenners of this world. Make no mistake about it—music itself may be pure, but the performance of it in public is always more duel than divertissement. And these girls… these girls will disappear. They always do. They play until they can be judged wunderkinder no longer, and then they marry and become musicians to the court or teachers, because that allows them to stay at home and care for their husbands and children. That is not the life I choose for you. Do you understand? A woman need not succumb to the diminished expectations with which society pretends to alleviate her lot. You will be a woman one day, but this does not mean you must sacrifice your life and your genius to custom and to the pressures of the temperate. Do you understand?”