How Clara Schumann Got Her Groove Back

River, Love

“What will become of my work?” – Clara Schumann, after learning she’s pregnant with her fifth child

I.
Her hands on the piano are birds she cannot name.

It’s April 1854 in Düsseldorf, rain and rain and flooded streets. Whenever Clara leaves the house to shop, she wades through water ankle-deep. Two months ago, her husband Robert was hospitalized following his most recent breakdown. He has stopped composing; Clara and the children are running out of money. She lifts her hands to her face, holds it—scent of onion she cut earlier.

II.
She’s born in Leipzig, 1819. That year bicycles are invented, and the English are colonizing Singapore. A few hours from Leipzig, pogroms against Jews have begun. Clara’s father runs a music store. She spends her early years among cellos and oboes, doesn’t speak until age four. After her parents’ divorce, Clara remains with her father. He instructs her in the piano and supervises practice every afternoon.

III.
Does she love Robert. She does, does, it begins when he’s a piano student of her father’s and she watches him in secret. After Robert’s lessons they stand outside together by the rowan. He’s softer in the eyes than her father, gentler overall. They talk; time pauses. Berries from the tree stain the walkway orange. When Clara turns 18, Robert asks her father’s permission to marry her. He says no. He has a different idea: Clara will remain his prodigy. Already she’s given performances throughout Germany and in Paris. She composes music, has published “Quatre Polonaises.” Despite her father’s heavy-handedness, Clara likes playing in public. She carries an agate in the pocket of her dress for luck.

Robert petitions the court, and eventually he and Clara are allowed to marry anyway.

IV.
Her memories of her mother are hazy and anxious: jasmine perfume, singing, her parents’ arguments. She keeps a pair of her mother’s boots beneath her bed. They grow dull with dust.

V.
After Clara and Robert marry, he enters the most creative period of his life. He composes more than a dozen new works. Clara gives birth to their first baby and subsequent children at one- and two-year intervals. She continues to perform, though less regularly, and mostly stops composing.

For years Robert has gone through melancholies, but the first sign of real trouble comes when he is 34 and the two of them are on a short tour. Clara gives piano concerts. Robert tries to work but can’t focus. There’s a constant buzzing in his ears, he says; he has difficulty sleeping, eating, carrying on a conversation. Back at home he takes to bed and doesn’t leave the house for a month. Clara climbs in and tries to console him with Heine and Keats—‘He found a palpitating snake, bright, and cirque-couchant in a dusky brake.’

VI.
Learning she’s pregnant with their fifth child, Clara writes, “What will become of my work?”

Robert tells her he believes babies are blessings. And, true—he writes music intended for children and spends much time with his own.

His struggles continue. He sometimes hears voices, and the note of ‘A’ drones on when he tries to compose. Eventually Robert tells Clara about ethereal music that has begun playing in his head. The sound of harmonized wind instruments—Like dancing spirits, he says.

VII.
A 21-year-old Johannes Brahms befriends the Schumann family. He spends a lot of time at their home, brings picnics, performs acrobatics on the banister to entertain the children. Sometimes at night the three adults talk music and drink Jägermeister by the fire.

Clara loses count of the number of her husband’s breakdowns. By 1853 the spirits who bring Robert music have turned malevolent. He worries aloud to Clara that he’s afraid he might harm her. He composes a fragmented piece for solo piano he titles Ghost Variations.

One winter dawn Robert jumps from a bridge over the Rhine. A boater dives in and pulls him out. Delivered home in a horse-drawn cart, Robert asks to be hospitalized. Clara is pregnant. A few months later she gives birth to their eighth child, a boy they name Felix. Robert remains in the hospital.

Their money situation: Clara could tour, but the children—she can’t leave the city. And even if she could convince herself to let her oldest daughter look after Felix, Clara cannot seem to make her hands move over the keys when she does sit down to play.

One evening Brahms stops by with kuchen for the children. Afterwards he tells Clara he loves her. She feels toward him as a mother to a son, she says.

VIII.
Rain keeps coming, overwashes the roof and streams down the windows. The Rhine flows hard, days of rush and roar. The piano remains untouched. The river river river: the morning he nearly drowned, Robert had walked to the Rhine in his dressing gown and slippers. Paid the bridge toll by bartering a silk handkerchief. It hurts Clara to think of him alone that day.

Johannes Brahms offers help with finances, but she’s uneasy accepting his money. Reluctantly, she does. Again and again he tells her he loves her. Clara feels—

Ambition expected in a man is unseemly in a woman.

IX.
Robert’s doctors convince her not to visit. It will upset him, they say. She imagines it though—silent corridors, smell of cooked meat, a solarium where Robert sits. They embrace. He asks, How are the children? Clara begins: school and lessons, friendships. So many children—it takes time. Robert looks away. Despair and guilt settle into Clara’s chest. Love. Anger. Love.

She writes him almost every day.

In a letter, Robert tells her he wants her to remarry. He does not mention Brahms. Clara tucks the letter into a drawer and tells no one about it.

After more than two years, with Robert’s health failing, she’s permitted a visit. He dies shortly after that.

X.
One morning five months after his death Clara puts her hands to the piano and finds she can play. Hours pass. A finch flies to the windowsill and looks inside. Eventually she goes into the kitchen and asks her older children to make lunch for the younger ones. Danke schön, she says.

She remains friends with Brahms and wonders.

XI.
A knock on her door nine months after Robert’s death, another rainy afternoon in April. “Mama?”

It’s Marie or Elisa, Julie, Ludwig or Ferdinand, Eugenie or Felix. Clara is practicing. She lifts her hands from the keys. “Come in.”

No. A knock on her door nine months after Robert’s death. “Mama?” Clara keeps playing. She’ll make kakao tonight and read aloud to them.