Longing (33 page)

“Seduce?” said the voice.

It was Robert, from whom she had been apart since before the New Year, their longest separation since she had been in Paris and more, she realized upon hearing his voice, than she should have been able to bear. Than she
could bear
, which is why, as interested as she was in overhearing her father's version of the attempted seduction, she opened the doors into the room, stepped inside, and closed the doors behind her.

There stood Robert and her father, near the fire, each with a cup of coffee and a cigar, standing the way men stand when there are no women about, puffed out a bit in the chest, close enough to listen but not to touch, eyes peering anywhere but into each other's eyes. Neither paid the least attention to her entry. Like peculiar twins, they simultaneously contemplated the ash on their respective cigars and, together, rained the excess down into the fire, looked again at the tips of the cigars, put the cigars into their mouths, drew in with decompressing cheeks, and through pursed lips released their smoke, which coalesced in the air above their heads into a private cloud.

With diminishing strips of smoke still unfolding from his mouth, her father said, “I did not say she
was
seduced. Only that there were many who made the effort. An entire string quartet! I had to bring in Banck as reinforcement.”

“Do you mean as a kind of reserve seducer?” Clara could not determine if Robert's tone mocked her father, Karl Banck, or herself.

“As a reserve
protector!
Of course he did so fine a job that he has virtually asked for her hand.”

Clara was about to interrupt when Robert seemed to speak for her. “Virtually? What does that mean? He asked for a finger first, or a knuckle, or perhaps the wrist before the hand, since he himself is all wrist at the piano?”

“By hand I mean marriage,” replied her father. “It is a symbol of the thing. Can you never have heard the expression?”

“I would have thought,” said Robert, “that there would be other parts of the body one would ask for in marriage.”

If only he would look at her, she would laugh. He could be such a funny fellow, and was the funnier when he teased her father, who, for all his virtues as a teacher and promoter of her career and guardian of her reputation, had the sense of humor of a gargoyle.

“How dare you!” said her father, with a predictability that was as expected and disappointing as Robert's ignoring of her was unexpected and disappointing.

She felt invisible, unwanted, desolate.

Robert, having imagined her somewhere in the house, felt her presence even before she came into the room. Thus he had assumed the posture of her father, a certain rigid insouciance he had noticed men adopted in their own homes before their own fires while smoking someone else's cigars, a kind of pride of ownership that seemed to protect them from the world and the world's judgment. He didn't care to be seen as he saw himself: no longer to be married to a girl he should not have wanted to marry in the first place. So bereft with the disappearance of Ludwig that he had found himself unable to return to the rooms they shared and had tried to live alone on the Halleschestrasse near the Promenade and failed, so now he had moved yet again, with yet another companion, Wilhelm Ulex, near the university in the false hope that he would be inspired by its ferment and protected by its crowds and obliviated by its countless taverns. Burdened enough by the politics of the magazine that he had purchased control of it and fired Julius Knorr as its editor and become its sole editor himself, which left him sufficiently little time for writing his music that he was now forced to compose through the nights at a pitch of creativity so fervid that come morning he often felt a grandiosity and an emptiness that combined to cause him excruciating doubt.

Thus, when Robert heard the parlor door open, he saw her in his mind before he could possibly have seen her in the room, his little friend come to find him and to help him find himself, as if she might with her presence deliver back the time stolen from them in their absence from one another, bring Ludwig back to life, restore to him the pleasure of his Ernestine, allow to him the childishness he knew with her, with Clara, that place within his being in which, when he was judged, he was judged by her alone and only in accordance with her laughter and her visible delight.

Yet when she entered, and he glimpsed her as she turned to close the doors, he felt that she, like him, had taken on the pretense of another. She came into the room a woman, tall, rounded, full, the movement of her hand upon the doorknob gently wanton, the stretch of her arm languorous, the shifting of her shoulders quite incautious, and the slope of her back so very unexpected that he turned away his eyes. She was not so much a stranger as strange, so unfamiliar as to have been remade in an image that was drawn from his own desires but upon which he could not permit himself to gaze.

He could not bear to look at her, for fear of what his eyes would say.

Leipzig

SEPTEMBER 13, 1835

It always gave Mendelssohn pleasure to take

very lively tempi with Clara
.

Robert Schumann

The first gifts Clara received for her sixteenth birthday came from Robert. They were delivered at six-thirty in the morning, by which time she had been long awake because of her excitement over the day and her desire to finish her practicing before the festivities began.

There was a beautiful little basket with a porcelain handle, and within the basket was a gold watch, which she hoped was not from Robert alone, because it was much too expensive and would mock the mere watch chain she had given him for his birthday in June.

Indeed, his card made clear that the watch was from the entire League of David, while the basket was from him alone. It was a fine basket, something to put on a shelf in her room and admire from afar. But it could not match the letter he had sent two weeks before, in which he had told her she had the face of an angel and had ended by saying, “You know how precious you are to me.”

His next gift came in a huge box. With her father standing over her, Clara went down on her knees to open it.

“Books?” he said with disbelief.

They were leatherbound and smelled quite wonderful. “‘The complete works of Bulwer-Lytton,'” she read from Robert's card. She picked up one of the books. “
The Last Days of Pompeii
.”

Her father peered over her shoulder. “Volume Three! Why would he think you would ever have time to read all these books? We would need another carriage just to carry these to your performances.”

Clara hugged the book to her bosom. “Perhaps he plans to read them aloud to me.”

After a splendid morning with all the boys of David—Clara was, delightedly, the only woman—at the crowded and noisy Kuchengarten, where Clara hid behind a giant bouquet of stork's-bill so she wouldn't have to make a speech, everyone went back to the Wieck house for dinner. There she changed from one birthday dress, of merino, into another, of mousseline de soie.

The guest of honor at her birthday dinner was Felix Mendelssohn, who had arrived in Leipzig only two weeks earlier. He had been driven out of Berlin by religious intolerance—“They apparently do not like Lutherans there,” he quipped—and into Leipzig by the offer of the directorship of the Gewandhaus orchestra, whose members he won over by immediately securing for them a handsome raise in pay.

Mendelssohn was at this time twenty-six, one year older than Robert and vastly more renowned. At the age of twelve, after a year in which he had written several symphonies, two operas, and some complex fugues for string quartet, he had played for, and virtually been adopted by, Goethe, who agreed to receive him after Felix's teacher had written to say that the boy was not only his best student but, though the son of a Jew, no Jew himself. As Felix had mentioned to Clara in Paris in 1831, Goethe compared himself to King Saul when he said to Felix, “You are my David,” having no idea that at the same time in Zwickau there was another David sitting at the piano playing Bach.

When Mendelssohn was fifteen, Ignaz Moscheles had traveled all the way from London to Berlin simply to hear him play the piano. At sixteen, Mendelssohn had written his Octet for strings and the next year his Overture to
A Midsummer Night's Dream.
*
One month beyond his twentieth birthday, he brought Sebastian Bach back from the dead with his revival of the
St. Matthew Passion
in Berlin.

It was to Berlin that his grandfather, Moses Mendelssohn, had walked the eighty miles from Dessau in 1743, when he was fourteen. As a Jew, he was required to skulk into the capital of Imperial Prussia through a particular portal. On the day Moses Mendelssohn entered Berlin, the guard wrote, “Today through the Rosenthaler Gate passed six oxen, seven pigs, one Jew.”

Most Jews in Berlin became beggars or peddlers, for want of any other permissible occupation: they were not allowed to manufacture anything, nor to supply the government or army with anything they might have manufactured had they been allowed to in the first place, nor to own land, nor (even as the peddlers they were allowed to become) to sell anything—food in particular, for obvious reasons—except to other Jews, nor to teach anything, including music, to anyone but other Jews, nor to touch anyone who was not a Jew with so much as a fingertip, let alone so intimate a part of the body as a lip. Only their human waste was allowed to mingle with that of non-Jews, on the theory that Jews made good fertilizer, though curiously they were required to inhabit their own cemeteries.

It was in Berlin that Moses Mendelssohn was befriended by Robert Schumann's distant relative Gotthold Lessing, the man who was for an evening to have the happy experience of forgetting that he was who he was without having to stop being who he was. It was upon Moses Mendelssohn, who practiced one of the most difficult professions to suppress—he was a Thinker—that Lessing based the hero of
Nathan the Wise
.

Moses' son, Abraham—the self-proclaimed “dash” between Moses and Felix, the man known first as the son of his father and then as the father of his son—eventually settled in Hamburg, where Felix was born in 1809. Three years later, the entire family was forced by the approach of Napoleon's Russia-bound army—under the command of the merciless Marshal Davout, who indeed succeeded in occupying Hamburg—to flee back to Berlin. But if Napoleon had uprooted them, he had also made them rich: In defeating Prussia in 1806, he had blockaded all trade with his remaining enemy, England, which allowed Abraham Mendelssohn, operating out of Hamburg's ungovernable port, to carry on as one of history's most benign if successful smugglers an illicit trade with that country in iron, leather, coffee, and tea, and in particular the English cloth so prized that it was worn, however traitorously if cozily, by French troops.

It was in Berlin in 1816 that the Mendelssohns converted their children to Lutheranism (they themselves would sneak off later to Frankfurt to effect the same inversion). This was by no coincidence whatsoever the same year that the Prussians issued the following
votum
, which means, as does the word
vote
, a
vow
, even a
desire:

It would be best not to have any Jews in this country. We must suffer those we presently have, but at the same time we must ceaselessly attempt to make them as inoffensive as possible. Jews must be converted to Christianity, and all their rights as citizens will depend on this conversion. As long as a Jew remains a Jew, he cannot exist in the eyes of the State.

In an attempt to bury once and for all his family's debilitating Jewishness under the protective and ordurous shroud of a Christian name, Felix's father took his four children in great secrecy to the Church of Jerusalem, where they were baptized Bartholdy, the name of a large garden by the river in Berlin, which the family purchased. But the Berliners were not fooled. From then on, proving that it's easier to convert a piece of earth than the soul of man, Bartholdy Garden became known publicly as Jew Garden.

Felix, though he considered himself a Lutheran, preferred the name Mendelssohn to either Bartholdy or Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, particularly because in England, the country that had made his family rich and where he was most lionized as both performer and composer, he was known simply as Mendelssohn, and he knew enough to know that the last people one should confuse are one's best customers.

He was a very handsome young man. George Grove called his face “the most beautiful I ever saw, like what I imagine our Saviour's to have been.”

Like his grandfather, Moses, Felix knew German, Italian, English, French, Greek, and Latin. As children, he and his sisters published a newspaper from their home with contributions from the likes of Heinrich Heine and Georg Hegel.
*
By the time he was eleven, he had written more than sixty pieces of music, which he copied in a hand so precise that those who saw the compositions believed they had been press-printed.

Robert had been introduced to Felix in the Gewandhaus by none other than Henriette Voigt, who had progressed from making sexual matches to those of a wholly musical nature. At that first meeting, Robert said, “I know all your work.”

“Good Lord,” replied Mendelssohn. “I wrote so many pieces as a child that for anyone to see them now would be the equivalent of my standing here on the Gewandhaus stage with my pants down.”

“Exactly as I've imagined myself many times,” said Robert.

“With whom?”

“Oh, I couldn't possibly say.”

“But you must,” said Mendelssohn.

“You really must,” said Henriette.

“A young lady,” said Robert.

“I had imagined no other,” said Mendelssohn. “How young?”

“Almost sixteen, I should imagine,” said Henriette.

“That isn't young,” said Mendelssohn. “I was in love with Delphine von Schauroth in Munich when she was sixteen. Of course, I was only twenty-two then myself, so there wasn't much distance between our ages.”