Longing (71 page)

I am leaving next month to play in various cities but will return home briefly for Christmas and can only wish you will too. Before New Year's I shall have to leave again, this time for Vienna. It will be nearly ten years since we went with Marie and Elise. I shall play your music and Beethoven's, and if the Viennese still cannot appreciate it I shall never play there again.

Please, I beg of you, write back to me even if it's only one word. It matters not what the word is, so long as the word is yours, addressed to me,

Your beloved wife,

Clara

September 10, 1855

Dear Frau Schumann,

Your husband is unable to answer your letter of September 4. Far from showing improvement, he has been declining in health. We do all we can to keep him comfortable, and we continue to try to understand what is causing his illness. But I can no longer hold out any hope whatsoever of a full recovery. You would be wise to begin to come to terms with this difficult prognosis and its meaning to your life.

Yours sincerely,

Franz Richarz

January 6, 1856

Dear Pepi,

It is three years exactly since our debacle in Hanover. As I am not one to let an anniversary pass without celebration, allow me to thank you again for canceling my string quartet and saving us both the embarrassment we suffered over my Fantasie. What a shame the critics were as deaf as King George was blind.

I have written you before with sympathetic ink and am doing so now between these visible lines. Be sure to hold this letter over heat in order to find those words I want no one else to see.

I understand from the doctors that you have suggested I be galvanized. I appreciate your concern for my health. My fear, however, is that these quacks will hook me up to the electrostimulation machine at the same time they are giving me one of their endless enemas (“endless” repetitive, not “endless” continuous). That's all I need—dynamized turds. That's all
they
need!

As it is, I am fed the selfsame calomel given at the end of
his
life to my much adored and much mourned Schunke. It is both diuretic and sialogogue, so that I am the very model of a baroque fountain, albeit one perpetually in the wind, spraying from distant latitudes. It's a remedy for whores, I suppose, but whores'
what?

I am also now and then threatened with the application of mustard plasters as a form of counterirritation. Imagine—to attack pain with pain. They might as well cut off one's head to put an end to doubt and misgiving.

I have been working on several pieces. A reduction of your Heinrich overture and piano accompaniment for the Paganini Caprices. My dream is that the two of you arrive together to play for me. My own music is now silent—at least outwardly.

Where is Johannes? Is he with you now? Is he flying high or only under flowers? I should dearly love to be at his side on his flight over the world. Does he still allow no trumpets or timpani to resound? Tell him to remember how Beethoven begins his symphonies and then do the same thing. He must
begin
—that's the main thing. Once you've begun, the end arrives to meet you. Just like life itself.

Where is Johannes?
(Forgive me. I didn't mean to repeat that in visible ink but am too weary to write this whole thing over in order to hide it.)

Yours,

Robert Schumann

*
The last letter she would receive from her husband.

*
The last piece for solo piano she would write.

*
On March 26, 1827, during a violent storm, Beethoven shook his fist at the sky in the midst of a peal of thunder so great it pierced even his deafness. Having thus conducted the music of heaven, he fell back dead.

Endenich

JANUARY 11, 1856

I could spend a whole day calling you beloved

and still not have said enough
.

Johannes Brahms

Schumann sat at the square piano. With his vest unbuttoned and his sleeves rolled up and ashes from his smoldering cigar flecked upon his shirt front, he looked like a student again. His hair, unwashed and oily enough to ignite from his cigar, was wholly black still, unusual for a man of forty-five and almost freakish for a man of forty-five in an institution like this, where hair went gray as if it were required in the regimen of cure. Indeed, Dr. Richarz considered it a bad sign when hair did not go gray, for it meant the patient was fighting mightily against the dispersion of stress. Stress did not literally rise up out of the head, but, as a consequence of the intransigent intimacy of mind and body, it seemed to, turning the hair gray, or even white, on its way out. Antonio Vivaldi's red hair, Schumann had told him, had not gone gray either, and he was in his sixties when he died, disordered from his prodigality, far away from home, in Vienna, where Clara was at this very moment and so was Vivaldi, but no one knew where, because his grave, like Mozart's, was unmarked, and why not, for we are all walking tombstones and might perhaps prefer a little anonymity once we've pitched.

Schumann's hands flew over the keys of the piano, as the saying went, but in truth they flew across the keys, upon the keys,
into
the keys, and therein lay the problem. What he played was unbearable, as if the mind from which it issued were totally paralyzed.

“Bravo,” interrupted Dr. Richarz.

Schumann ceased in what seemed mid-note.

“Fugues. Shall I take up where I left off?”

“How could you?”

“That is one of the magic properties of fugues. They seem unstructured to the ear but to the mind are structured to the breaking point. I can prove it. Shall I take up where I left off?”

“Please.”

Schumann poised his hands over the keyboard.

Dr. Richarz locked open his mouth as a way to reduce his hearing.

“So where did I leave off?”

“
I'm
to tell you that?”

“Of course. You're the one who heard it.”

“I'm to tell you what
note
?”

“Not what note. What difference does the note make? I want the sound. Sing it for me up to where I stopped. I'll take it from there.”

“I couldn't possibly.”

“Embarrassed to sing in public?”

“I sing in church.”

“That's not singing. That's conforming. Here, this is singing. This is how you sing a fugue:
da da da da, dadadadadadada, da da da da, dadadadadadada, da dadadadadada, da dadadadadada, da da, da da, da da, dadadada
. There. You see. A fugue. Fugues are my therapy. I've told you how when I was young I copied out every note of the
Art of the Fugue
and when I was finished I was purged of all madness. Fugues offer a vision of perfection with none of perfection's perfection. They are the ideal parent, strict and forgiving at once. Elastic and secure. And they come with many voices, just like me!”

“Yes, I remember—
Fugenpassion
.”

“Forget
Fugenpassion
—
Fugenwut
!”
*

“But perhaps it's when passions become frenzies that the mind becomes ill. Think of politics.”

“Yes, but think of love.”

“Frenzy?”

“The mind must match the body in the idiom of love. It must
explode
!”

“But Endenich is where people come when their minds
have
exploded.”

“Or when their minds have … what is the opposite of ‘explosion'?”

“Implode, I suppose.”

“No …
recoil
—that's what I mean! Do you have any idea what it feels like to go mad?”

“Yes, I have some idea.”

“Do you have any knowledge?”

“I know the symptoms, certainly.”

“But the feeling?”

“No, not the feeling, I'm happy to say.”

“Shall I tell you?”

“Of course.”

“It feels like this.”

Schumann brought both fists down violently upon the keys of the piano, knuckles first. He held them there so the sound was sustained in his small sitting room and then removed one finger at a time so the absonant chord he made was decomposed note by note until there was a tiny sound in the air that finally, though he kept that one finger down upon the key, dissolved.

“Look at your hands!”

His knuckles were bloodied. There was also a smear of red visible upon the white keys.

“You ask me to look, and I ask you to hear. We remain far apart in our approach to my madness. Now bring me some paper. Music paper. There's something small I want to write down.”

“I know what it is.”

“What?”

“What you just played.”

“My fugue?”

“No. That chord. That chord you say represents your madness.”

Schumann stared at the end of his cigar. He shook his head. He touched the end of a finger to it. He shook his head again.

“Don't worry. I have the chord memorized. You can't think much of my future as a composer if you think I would ask for music paper in order to write down a single chord.”

“For what, then?”

“I'm writing songs again. Songs for my distant beloved.”

“Ah, Beethoven.” Dr. Richarz smiled the proud little smile of the allusion-savvy.

“Well, these are really my own. Shall I sing you one? Don't worry—I won't smear the blood all over the piano. I'll just sing. Listen.”

Oh, won't you come to Endenich

Or would that not be politic

For you to come to Endenich

To see your favorite lunatic?

I beg you come to Endenich

And I suggest you get here quick

So that you'll be here in the nick

Of time left me in Endenich.

It's not a place that you might pick

To come to whether well or sick

But judge me not a heretic …

We all end up in Endenich!

Schumann found a match in his pocket and lit his cigar with it, nodding all the time at Dr. Richarz as if simultaneously to solicit and to influence his opinion of the song.

Dr. Richarz touched the index finger of each hand to the meatus of each ear. “As you know, my hearing—”

“That's no excuse! Don't you know the old saying that musicians love to quote after performances by their rivals?—Never blame the hearing for what the heart detests.”

“Detests? I didn't detest it. I merely thought…”

“Thought? I ask you to listen, and you
think
!”

“I thought it was not true—we do not all end up in Endenich.”

Schumann laughed. “Oh, I don't mean
here
.” He swept his arm around to take in the entire institution, leaving a trail of smoke and ashes floating in the air. “I meant…
Endenich
. Not your Endenich. Not
my
Endenich. But Endenich. Who can deny
that?
‘We all end up in Endenich,'” he sang the last sentence.

“But will she like it? Will she not be terribly disturbed by it?”

“Who?”

“Your distant beloved.”

“And who might that be?”

“She … her … your wife.”

“And you think this song is addressed to her?”

“Is it not?”

“‘Beloved' is not singular, sir. I address it to everyone. After all, we all end up in Endenich.”

Dr. Richarz rose, shaking his head. “I hesitate to bring you paper on which to write down such a song.”

“Oh, I'm not planning to write out this song. I'm still composing this song. In my mind. You remember my mind. You used to visit it with some regularity. Before you became more enraptured by my poor body. No, it's not this song. It's another. Shall I sing it to you?”

“Absolutely not!”

“It's not mine. It's nearly three hundred years old. I'm merely harmonizing it. I'm doing my own little setting. Bach did three of this same piece. I told you it was just something small. My Endenich piece is not small. It's less than small. But this piece is merely small.”

“What is it?”

“A hymn.”

“I like hymns.”

“I should think you would. Shall I play it?”

“I don't trust you, Herr Schumann.”

“I should think you wouldn't.”

Schumann turned his back on Dr. Richarz and placed his hands on the keyboard. His knuckles were now more raw than bloody, but the blood on the keys themselves seemed somehow not to have dried, and he moved it with the tips of his fingers to whatever note he played, as he sang,

When my final hour is at hand

To leave this blessed earth

I beg Thee Lord Jesus Christ

To comfort me in my suffering.

Lord, my heart at the end

I entrust into Thy hands.

Thou well knowest how to protect it.

*
Fugal passion; fugal frenzy. Schumann had learned that the study of counterpoint, so demanding in its formality, might ease the informality of madness, its, literally, derangement. And so he studied both the influential theoretical work of Friedrich Marpurg (who when he was not theorizing upon fugues was, as if to balance inevitability with improbability, director of the Prussian State Lottery) and what Schumann called his “grammar,” Bach's
Well-Tempered Clavier
, whose fugues he claimed could strengthen one's very morality (by which he meant not behavior but the purity of one's relationship to art). In 1845, when terrifying thoughts had brought him to the “verge of despair,” he was advised by Clara to write fugues of his own. This he did for both the piano and the pedal-piano, which had an extra set of strings and hammers and which Schumann, in the midst of his
Fugenwut
, believed would become a standard in the catalog of indispensable musical instruments. As much as he valued the study of the fugue, Schumann was also fond of quoting the following anonymous definition of same: a composition in which one voice races away from the others—and the listener from them all.