Good Things I Wish You (20 page)
Read Good Things I Wish You Online
Authors: Manette Ansay
How much I have possessed and how much lost! Where did I find the strength to live on for so much longer, and to keep working? Whence comes the courage of human beings? The children—and the artist life; it is their love and the compulsion of art that have borne me up…
—Clara, in her diary, 1884
*
The thought of my D-minor sonata proceeding gently and dreamily under your fingers is so beautiful. I actually put it on my desk and gently, deliberately accompanied you through the thickets of the organ point. For me there is no greater pleasure than to be always at your side…
—Brahms, in a letter to Clara, 1889
*
Bickley, Nora, editor and translator.
Letters from and to Joseph Joachim.
London: Macmillan, 1914.
Burk, John.
Clara Schumann: A Romantic Biography.
New York: Random House, 1940.
Harding, Bertita.
Concerto: The Glowing Story of Clara Schumann.
Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1961.
Holde, Artur. “Suppressed Passages in the Brahms–Joachim Correspondence Published for the First Time.”
The Musical Quarterly
45, no. 3 (1959): 312–24.
Litzmann, Berthold, editor.
Clara Schumann–Johannes Brahms: Briefe,
vol. 1
.
Leipzig: Breitkopf und Hartel, 1927.
———.
Clara Schumann: An Artist’s Life, Based on Material Found in Diaries and Letters.
Translated by Grace E. Hadlow. 2 vols. New York: Vienna House, 1972.
———.
Letters of Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms, 1853–1896,
vol. 1. New York: Vienna House, 1973.
Nauhaus, Gerd, editor, and Peter Ostwald, translator.
The Marriage Diaries of Robert and Clara Schumann: From Their Wedding Day Through the Russia Trip.
Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993.
Reich, Nancy.
Clara Schumann: The Artist and the Woman.
Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985.
Reich, Susanna.
Clara Schumann: Piano Virtuoso.
New York: Clarion Books, 1999.
Schumann, Eugenie.
The Schumanns and Johannes Brahms: The Memoirs of Eugenie Schumann.
Lawrence, Mass.: Music Book Society, 1991.
Swafford, Jan.
Johannes Brahms: A Biography.
New York: Vintage Books, 1999.
8. Clara Schumann at Thirty-five
9. The Wife Stands Even Higher than the Artist
12. Self-Portrait: Gaela Erwin
17. Schumann’s Beethoven, 2006
21. Things Between Men and Women
24. As Long as I Don’t Take This Step
All clutter-collages were assembled from published texts (acknowledged under Sources), quotes and translations, translations in progress, journal entries, handwritten notes, props, old portraits, new photos—in other words, everything and everything that cluttered my desk during the writing of
Good Things I Wish You
.
I am grateful to Gaela Erwin for permission to use, on Chapter 13, one of her many exquisite and unique self-portraits. Thanks to Michael R. Ansay for the use of his photograph “Interior” on Chapter 20.
The quotations from Berthold Litzmann’s German edition of
Clara Schumann–Johannes Brahms: Briefe
(cited as
Briefe
throughout the text) are original translations by Winfried Reichelt.
I would like to thank my first reader, Sylvia Ansay, as well as Dick Ansay (who else could find a laser printer—on sale!—in the mountains of North Carolina?); Carolyn Broadhead; Jan Conner (for stories and a quiet place to write); Preston Merchant and CJ Hribal (for good advice and kind words); Stewart O’Nan (with whom I wrote, over ten years ago, a screenplay about Clara and Brahms);
Felicitas Reichelt; the Ragdale Foundation; and the faculty, students, and staff of the MFA program at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, especially Lydia Starling and Pat McCarthy. Shari and Tom Goodmann: this book could not have been written without the music of your friendship and good advice.
I’m grateful to Jake Smith for recovering this manuscript after my old computer crashed and setting me up on a new computer (which had been sitting under my desk for a year because I didn’t have the energy to deal with it). Jake also developed the artistic design of my Web site. Thank you to Tim and Naoko Soderberg for help with my Japanese English and for suggesting the beautiful name Midori. Thanks to Laura Schalk for helping me out with French. Albert Uster, no longer with us, gave me all the right directions for finding exactly the Gersau I wanted to see.
Thanks to my life mentor, Deborah Schneider, for the best line in this book. Thanks to Claire Wachtel and HarperCollins for letting me take a few chances. Thanks to Sanna Mehlin Tilley, Marissa Matteo, Carla Garcia, Yolanda Jiminez, and, most especially, Ariana Ramieri.
And thank you, Genevieve Ansay, for suggesting the pitch-perfect name for the daughter in this book.
A. MANETTE ANSAY
is the author of eight books, including
Vinegar Hill, Midnight Champagne
(a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award), and
Blue Water
. She has received the Pushcart Prize, two Great Lakes Book Awards, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. She teaches in the MFA writing program at the University of Miami.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
Blue Water
Vinegar Hill
Read This and Tell Me What It Says
Sister
River Angel
Midnight Champagne
Limbo: A Memoir
Jacket photograph © Wojtek Buss/Age Fotostock
Jacket design by Archie Ferguson
GOOD THINGS I WISH YOU
. Copyright © 2009 by A. Manette Ansay. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Adobe Digital Edition May 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-188787-1
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*
Berthold Litzmann, ed.,
Letters of Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms, 1853– vol. 1 (New York: Vienna House, 1973), 73 (hereafter cited as Letters).
*
Ibid., 88.
*
The definitive book on All Things Clara is
Clara Schumann: The Artist and the Woman
by Nancy Reich. Also recommended:
Johannes Brahms: A Biography
by Jan Swafford. Three recent novelizations, in English, include
Clara
by Janice Galloway,
Longing
by J. D. Landiss, and
Trio
by Boman Desai. As an adolescent, I read and reread
Clara Schumann: A Romantic Biography
by John Burk.
*
“…my father always scoffed at so-called
domestic bliss
. How I pity those who are unfamiliar with it! They are only half alive!”—Clara Schumann, in a diary entry shortly after her marriage. Quoted in Gerd Nauhaus, ed., Peter Ostwald, trans.,
The Marriage Diaries of Robert and Clara Schumann
(Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993), 63.
*
Nancy Reich,
Clara Schumann: The Artist and the Woman
(Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985), 84.
*
Literally translated as “ Wieck sold pianos, gave lessons, and boarded promising students in the upstairs rooms, where he lived with Clara, her younger brothers, and, eventually, his second wife and their children.
*
Nancy Reich’s excellent chronology (pp. 17–20) in Clara Schumann: The Artist and the Woman lists the destinations and durations of Clara’s major concert tours. The figures are extraordinary.
*
Nauhaus and Ostwald,
The Marriage Diaries
, 84.
†
Reich,
Clara Schumann
, 113.
*
Ibid., 88.
*
Ibid., 86.
*
www.schumannzwickau.de.