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Longing
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Against a backcloth of early 19th century Europe in cultural and political turmoil, this vivid account of the love of the composer Robert Schumann for pianist Clara Wieck unfolds. Drawing on his protagonists' letters and journals, JD Landis spins a compelling tale of Robert and Clara's passion, enforced separation, marriage and the eventual love triangle created by the devotion to Clara of Schumann's pupil Johannes Brahms. With a supporting cast that includes Chopin, Liszt, Goethe, Mendelssohn, Kierkegaard, Paganini and Hans Christian Andersen, he builds a rich narrative of musical genius, desire, obsession and madness. Longing is a powerful romantic tale played out amidst the flowering of German romanticism, combining the anatomy of a lifelong love affair with a journey through one of Europe's most vital periods of artistic creativity.
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He lies in bed, waiting for Clara. Southeast, over the roofs and spires of Bonn and across the Rhine, his favorite river until it belched him back, the peaks of the Siebengebirge will not relinquish the sun. Each morning they grasp it at their back and tease him with it. Guess which hand. He has played the same game with his children. Of them all—eight, when he counts the dead Emil—he misses most the one he’s never seen. Felix. The mathematics of conception have proven sporadically diverting. Or what passes for diversion in an institution such as this, which, to give it its name despite the civilized beauty of its gardens and the willingness of his half-deaf doctor to engage in endless, intimate conversation, must be called a madhouse: Felix Schumann, born June 11, 1854, three months, seven days after his father had been taken to Endenich. Had begged to be taken to Endenich, though it was the sort of place he feared above all others. (Probably because he’d always known he’d end up in one. He used to fear death, too.) Conceived, therefore, September 1853. Which was precisely the month there appeared at their door in Düsseldorf an angel, a demon, a child-voiced boy of the vaguely familiar name Johannes Brahms, with long blond hair and blue eyes and strong hands and a face merely beautiful until he played the piano, and then it was transfigured. Were he to have another son, which seems out of the question considering the fact he hasn’t even seen his wife in the nearly two and a half years since he was taken to Endenich, he would name him Johannes. A daughter: Clara. And if Johannes Brahms were indeed the father of Felix, and therefore his wife’s lover, he would be Robert’s lover as well, for an absent husband resides as much within his wife as within Endenich, and her pleasure therefore becomes his own and the possession of her, too, the possession of himself. He longs for her. Cut off from her by mountain and valley, so much space and time between themselves and peace, happiness and suffering, he longs. That’s what desire turns to over time: long-ing. It doesn’t become merely protracted with the passage of the days and nights but intensifies into what seems an eternal cupidity. It becomes an emptiness unrelieved by either imagination or memory. It’s an emptiness he’s fed, ironically, by refusing to eat. He stopped eating in order to die. Therefore, Dr. Richarz had him fed with a tube. And a tube down the throat or nose, no matter how thoughtfully it’s been greased, oiled, waxed, or otherwise mollified, in and of itself ruins the appetite. To get him to eat, they destroyed his desire to eat. Where was the satisfaction in starvation after that? What they’ve fed him since is some kind of soup whose consistency reminds him of cold semen, washed down with wine because he still loves wine, almost as much as he still loves to smoke. And if there’s any reason not to die it is to continue to be able to have the occasional cigar, preferably during every waking moment, while sitting by one’s smoking stand with an atlas in one’s lap, plotting elopement into the great book of the world. Clara has sent him cigars now and then. When he smokes them, and draws the smoke as far down into his body as his weakened breath will permit, he imagines she had touched the cigar and that it is she who enters him, becomes the kind of vapor that invades him as she always has, carried by his blood to the very insides of his eyes. But he knows he won’t actually see her until he’s dead, and then what sight he has will be the sight of the dead, which if it’s anything is backward sight, memory alone. Death must kill the present, or otherwise it would be called not death but something else, like lapse or lull or interlude. But at least they would be reunited, not that a funeral makes for a particularly satisfying reunion when one of the parties is the deceased.
