Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [70]
When Clara was born in Leipzig in September 1819, her father, Friedrich Wieck, had already decided to make his daughter a great pianist. With ruthless dedication and a remarkable gift for teaching, Friedrich shaped Clara to his blueprint, in the process divorcing her mother and brutalizing her brothers and repudiating anything else that threatened his design. Clara did not merely submit to her father’s manipulation, she blossomed in it. She grew up with Friedrich Wieck’s single-minded tenacity, if without his ruthlessness and cynicism. The father ran on ambition and envy and money and malice, the daughter on a religious devotion to music, driven competitiveness, an appetite for performing that she called “the very breath of my nostrils.” In her childhood, the worst of her father’s intricate punishments had been to forbid Clara to play the piano. He also expected her to compose, telling her she could do that or anything else as well as a man. In her teens, Clara wrote a piano concerto and a number of other pieces, and publishers battled for her work.
She debuted at the Leipzig Gewandhaus at age nine and at eleven performed her first solo concert there. Her first tour to Vienna at age eighteen set off a frenzy, with Grillparzer writing poetry to her and police having to prevent ticket-seekers from storming the box office.4 In Vienna the emperor named her Royal and Imperial Chamber Virtuosa—the first time that exalted title had been given to a foreigner, a Protestant, a teenager, or a woman.5
For all its excitement, no one escapes the effects of a childhood as unforgiving as Clara’s. By the time of her Viennese sensation, she was already showing the melancholy and hysteria that would mark her life, alongside the profound musical understanding, the impeccable technique, the relentless self-discipline. When she was a teenager one saw the sadness shadowing her face and her great dark-blue eyes. One observer said, “Poor child! She has a look of unhappiness and of suffering … but she owes perhaps a part of her fine talent to this inclination to melancholy.” Another, who may have been the poet Heinrich Heine, wrote, “It seems as though the child could tell a long story, a story woven out of joy and pain—and yet—what does she know? Music.”6
By eighteen Clara had fallen in love with the extraordinary figure who replaced her father as the brilliant and volatile man in her life. Born in Zwickau in 1810, Robert Schumann came to live and study with Friedrich Wieck when he was twenty and Clara eleven. By then he had begun to compose and showed a flair for rhapsodic improvisations at the keyboard, but he mainly dreamed of becoming a piano virtuoso.
By then, the other compelling force in Robert Schumann’s life had also announced itself: his first psychotic episode struck just before age eighteen, as he read a Jean Paul novel in a park outside Leipzig.7 During the next years violent fantasies, heavy drinking, hallucinations, fervid and possibly homosexual alliances with youths, and creative transports kept Schumann ricocheting between euphoria and suicidal depression.8 In 1830, he wrote in his journal after a period of manic debauchery, “I’m terrified and disgusting—drunk because of boredom—very high—my longing to throw myself into the Rhine.”9 From his demon-haunted teens onward, the waters of the Rhine lay in his imagination as an escape, or an inescapable fate.
A promise he had made his late father to study law intensified all this Romantic malaise. In autumn of 1830, Schumann fled law studies to Friedrich Wieck, with the hope that this famous teacher could reassure his mother that he had potential as a virtuoso. Wieck declared to Madame Schumann, “I give my pledge