Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 / Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians

Professor Carus kept his ear close to the ground for a higher call, and when the call came from Leipzig, he moved there with his family.

It was not many weeks before Robert was writing home, explaining that lawyers were men who get good people into trouble, and bad folks out; and as for himself he had decided to cut the business and fling himself into the arms of the Muse.

This letter brought his mother down upon him with tears and pleadings that he would not fail to redeem the Schumanns by becoming a Great Man. Poetry was foolishness and all musicians were poor—there were a hundred of them in Zwickau who lived on rye-bread and wienerwurst.

The boy promised and the mother went home pacified. But not many weeks had passed before Robert set out on a pilgrimage to Bayreuth, to visit the scene of Jean Paul's romances. On this same tour he went to Munich, and there met Heinrich Heine, who was from that day to enter into his heart and jostle Jean Paul for first place. He was accompanied on this memorable trip by Gisbert Rosen, who proved his lifelong friend and confidant. Very naturally Leipzig was the ardently desired goal of his wanderings. At once on arriving there, he sought out the home of Professor and Madame Carus. That his greeting (and mayhap hers) did not contain all the warmth the boy lover had anticipated is shown in a letter to Rosen, wherein he says: "This world is only a huge graveyard of buried dreams, a garden of cypress and weeping willows, a silent peep-show with tearful puppets. Alas for our high faith—I wonder if Jean Paul wasn't right when he said that love lessens woman's delicacy, and time and distance dissipate it like morning dew?"

Yet Madame Carus was kind, for Robert played at little informal concerts at her house, and she urged him to abandon law for music; and he refers the matter to Rosen, asking Rosen's advice and explaining how he wants to be advised, just as we usually do. Rosen tells him that no man can succeed at an undertaking unless his heart is in the work, and so he shifts the responsibility of deciding on Professor Carus, whom Robert "respects," but does not exactly admire enough to follow his advice.

Robert does not consider the Professor a practical man, and so leaves the matter to his wife. In the meantime songs are written similar to Heine's, and essays turned off, pinned with the precise synonym, the phrase exquisite, just like Jean Paul's. Progress in piano-playing goes steadily forward, with practise on the violin, all under the tutelage of Madame Carus, who one fine day takes the young man to play for Frederick Wieck, the best music-teacher in Leipzig.

And so he did. He proved the value of his theories by making great performers of Maria and Clara, his daughters—two sisters more gifted in a musical way have never been born. Germany excels in philosophy and music—a seeming paradox. Music is supposed to be a compound of the stuff that dreams are made of—hazy, misty, dim, intangible feelings set to sounds—we close our eyes and they take us captive and carry us away on the wings of melody. And so it may be true that music is born of moonshine, and fragrant memories, and hopes too great for earth, and loves unrealized; yet its expression is the most exacting of sciences. A Great Musician has not only to be a poet and a dreamer, but he must also be a mathematician, cold as chilled steel, and a philosopher who can follow a reason to its lair and grapple it to the death. And that is why Great Musicians are so rare, and that is also why, perhaps, there are no great women composers. "Women of genius are men," said the De Goncourts. A Great Musician is a paradox, a miracle, a multiple-sided man—stern, firm, selfish, proud and unyielding; yet sensuous as the ether, tender as a woman, innocent as a child, and as plastic as potters' clay. And with most of them, let us frankly admit it, the hand of the Potter shook. When people write about musicians, they seldom write moderately. The man is either a selfish rogue or an angel of light—it all depends upon your point of view. And the curious part is, both sides are right.

Wieck was very fond of his daughters, and like good housewives who are proud of their biscuit, he apologized for them. "He never quite forgave our mother because we were girls," said Clara once, to Kalkbrenner. Wieck, the good man, was a philosopher, and he had a notion that the blood of woman is thinner than that of man—that it contains more white serum and fewer red corpuscles, and that Nature has designed the body of a woman to nourish her offspring, but that man's energy goes to feed his brain. Yet his girls were so much beyond average mortals that they would set men a pace in spite of the handicap.

Fortunate it is for me that I do not have to act as the court of last appeal on this genius business. The man who decides against woman will forfeit his popularity, have his reputation ripped into carpet-rags, and his good name worked up into crazy-quilts by a thousand Woman's Clubs.

But certain it is that women are the inspirers of music. As critics they are more judicial and more appreciative. Without women there would be no Symphony Concerts, any more than there would be churches.

Women take men to the Grand Opera and to Musical Festivals—and I am glad.

It was not so very long before Clara was wearing her dresses a little longer. She now dressed her hair in two braids instead of one, and these braids were tied with ribbons instead of a shoe-string. More concerts were being arranged, and the attendance was larger—people were saying that Clara Wieck was an Infant Phenomenon.

Robert was progressing, but not so rapidly as he wished. To aid matters a bit, he invented a brace and extension to his middle finger. It gave him a farther reach and a stronger stroke, he thought. In secret he practised for hours with this "corset" on his finger; he didn't know that a corset means weakness, not strength. After three straight hours of practise one day, he took the machine from his hand and was astonished to see the finger curl up like a pretzel. He hurried to a physician and was told that the member was paralyzed. Various forms of treatment were tried, but the tendons were injured, and at last the doctors told him his brain could never again telegraph to that hand so it would perfectly obey orders. He begged that they would cut the finger off, but this they refused to do, claiming that, even though the finger was in the way, piano-playing in any event was not the chief end of man—he might try a pick and shovel.

Clara, who now wore her dress to her shoe-tops, sympathized with the young man in his distress. She said, "Never mind, I will play for you—you write the music and I will play it!"

Gradually he became resigned to this, and spent much of his time composing music for Heine's songs and his own. Wieck didn't much like these songs, and forbade his daughter playing such trashy things—only a paraphrase of Schubert's work, anyway, goodness me!

The girl pouted and rebelled, and erelong Robert Schumann was requested to take lodgings elsewhere. Moodily he obeyed, but he managed to keep up a secret correspondence with Clara, through the help of her sister. Whenever Clara played in public, Robert was sure to be there, even though the distance were a hundred miles. He had given up playing, and now swung between composing and literature, having assumed the editorship of a musical magazine.

When Clara now played in concert, she wore a train, and her hair was done up on the top of her head.

Schumann's musical magazine was winning its way—the young man had a literary style. Mendelssohn commended the magazine, and its editor in turn commended Mendelssohn. A new star had been discovered on the horizon—a Pole, Chopin by name. And whenever Clara Wieck appeared, there were extended notices, lavish in praise, profuse in prophecy.

Herz had written an article for a rival journal about Clara Wieck, wherein the statement was made that no woman trained on, that her playing was intuitive, and the limit quickly reached—marriage was death to a woman's art, etc.

To this Schumann replied with needless heat, and his friends began to joke him about his "disinterestedness." He was getting moody, and there were times when he was silent for days. His passion for Clara Wieck was consuming his life. He resolved to go direct to Frederick Wieck and have it out.

And so they were married; but Frederick Wieck was not present at the ceremony to give the bride away.

Schumann built on Schubert. Music was to Schumann the expression of an emotion. He saw in pictures, then he told in tones, what his inward eye beheld. He even went so far as to give the names of persons, their peculiarities and experiences on the keyboard. It is needless to say that the tension of mind in such experiments is apt to reach the breaking strain. We are under bonds for the moderate use of every faculty, and he who misuses any of God's gifts may not hope to go unscathed.

The exquisite quality of Robert Schumann's imagination served to make him shun the society of vulgar people. The inability to grasp things intuitively harassed him, and he acquired a habit of keeping silence, except with the elect. He lived within himself, unless Clara were by, and then he leaned on her.

And what a strong, brave and beautiful soul she was! In a sense she sacrificed her own career for the man she loved. And by giving all, she won all.

Most descriptions of women begin by telling how the individual looked and what she wore. No pen-portraits of Clara Schumann have come down to us, for the reason that she was too great, too elusive in spirit, for any snapshot artist to attempt her. She never looked twice the same. In feature she was commonplace, her form lacked the classic touch, and her raiment was as plain as the plumage of a brown thrush in an autumn hedgerow. She was as homely as George Eliot, Mary Wollstonecraft, Rosa Bonheur, George Sand, or Madame De Stael. No two of the women named looked alike, but I once saw a composite photograph of their portraits and the picture sent no thrills along my keel. Their splendor was a matter of spirit. Have you ever seen the Duse?—there is but one. In repose this woman's face is absolute nullity. She starts with a blank—you would never take a second glance at her at a pink tea. Her dress is bargain day, her form so-so, her features clay.

But mayhap she will lift her hand and resting her chin upon it will look at you out of half-closed eyes that never are twice alike. If you are speaking you will suddenly become aware that she is listening, and then you will become uncomfortable and try to stop, but can not; for you will realize that you have been talking at random, and you want to redeem yourself.

The presence of this plain woman is a challenge—she knows! Yet she never contradicts, and when she wills it, she will lead you out of the maze and make you at peace with yourself; for our quarrel with the world is only a quarrel with self. When we are at peace with self we are at peace with God.

The Duse is a surprise, in that her homeliness of face masks an intellect that is a revelation. Her body is an exasperation to the tribe of Worth, but it houses a soul that has lived every life, died every death, known every sorrow, tasted every joy, and been one with the outcast, the despised, the forsaken; and has stood, too, clothed in shining raiment by the side of the great, the noble, the powerful. Knowing all, she forgives all. And across the face and out of the eyes, and even from her silence, come messages of sympathy—messages of strength, messages of a faith that is dauntless. Great people are simply those who have sympathy plus. Clara Schumann knew the excellence of her chosen mate, and through her sympathy made it possible for him to express himself at his highest and best. She also guessed his limitations and sought to hold him 'gainst the calamity she saw looming on the horizon, no bigger than a man's hand.

When he was moody and there came times of melancholy, she invited young people to the house; and so Robert mingled his life with theirs, and in their aspirations he shook off the demons of doubt.

It was in this way that he became interested in various rising stars, and although in some instances we are aware that his prophecies went astray, we know that he hailed Chopin and Brahms long before they had come within the ken of the musical world, that so often looks through the large end of the telescope. And this kindly encouragement, this fostering welcome that the Schumanns gave to all aspiring young artists, is not the least of their virtues. We love them because they were kind.

Such fortitude is sure to bear fruit, and friends flocked to her as never before. The way to secure friends is to be one.

Madame Schumann made concert tours throughout the Continent and England, meeting on absolute equality the music-loving people, as well as the Kings of Art. She played her husband's pieces with such a wealth of expression that folks wondered why they had never heard of them. And so today, wherever hearts are sad, or glad, and songs are sung, and strings vibrate, and keys respond to love's caress, there is in hearts that know and feel, a shrine; and on this shrine in letters of gold two words are carved, and they are these: THE SCHUMANNS.

SEBASTIAN BACH

We have sarcasm and cynicism, and we possess much that is clever, all produced by snatches of success, well mixed with disappointment and the bitterness which much contact with the world is sure to evolve. Our age that goes everywhere, knows everybody's business, and religiously reads only "the last edition," produces a Bill Nye, a Sam Jones, a Teddy Roosevelt, a DeWitt Talmage, a Hopkinson Smith, a Sam Walter Foss, a Victor Herbert; but it is not at all likely to produce a Praxiteles, a Michelangelo, a Rembrandt, an Immanuel Kant or a Johann Sebastian Bach.

Bach was so great that he had no artistic jealousy, no whim, and when harshly and unjustly criticized he did not concern himself enough with the quibblers to reply. He made neither apologies nor explanations. The man who thus allows his life to justify itself, and lets his work speak, and who, when reviled, reviles not again, must be a very great and lofty soul.

Bach was a villager and a rustic, and, like Jean Francois Millet, used to hoe in his garden, trim the vines, play with his children, putting them to bed at night, or in the day cease from his work to cut slices of brown bread which he spread with honey for the heedless little importuner, who had interrupted him in the making of a chorale that was to charm the centuries. At times he would leave his composing to help his wife with her household duties—to wash dishes, sweep the room or care for a peevish, fretful child. After the evening prayer, like Millet, again, when his household were all abed, he would often walk out into the night alone, and traverse his solitary way along a wintry road, through the woods or by the winding river, a dim, misty, shadowy figure, spectral as the "Sower," lonely as the "Fagot-Gatherer," talking to himself, mayhap, and communing with his Maker.

In his later years, when he traveled from one village or city to another to attend musical gatherings, he was always accompanied by one or more of his sons. His ambition was centered on his children, and his hope was in them. Yet nothing has been added to either organ-building, organ-playing or composition for the organ since his time.

He never knew, any more than Shakespeare knew, that he had set a pace that would never be equaled. He would have stood aghast with incredulity had he been told that centuries would come and go and his name be acclaimed as Master.

Such was Sebastian Bach—simple, polite, modest, unaffected, generous, almost shy—doing his work and doing it as well as he could, living one day at a time, loving his friends, forgetting his enemies. His heart was filled with such melodies that their echo is a blessing and a benediction to us yet. Art lives!

This man had a son by the name of Hans, a weaver and a right merry wight, who traveled over the country attending weddings, christenings and such like festivals, playing upon a fiddle of his own construction. So famous was Hans Bach that his name lives in legend and folklore, wherein it is related that often betimes when he arrived at a village, the word would be passed and the whole population would quit work and caper on the green. So luring was his fiddle, and so potent his voice in song and story, that in a few instances preachers with long faces warned their flocks against him; and once we find a country Dogberry had his minions lay the innocent Hans by the heels and give him a taste of the stocks, simply because he seduced a party of haymakers into following him off to a dance at a tavern, and in the meantime a storm coming up, the hay got wet. Poor Hans protested that he had nothing to do with the storm, but his excuses were construed as proof of guilt and went for naught.

At last in his wanderings, Hans found a buxom lass who was willing to take him for better or worse.

And they were married and lived happily ever after, or fairly so.

This marriage quite sobered the fun-loving fiddler, so that he settled down and worked at his weaving; and at odd hours made himself a bass viol that looked to be father of all the fiddles. In Eisenach I was told that this viol was ten feet high. Hans used to play this instrument at the village church, and his playing drew such crowds that the preacher had just cause for jealousy, and improved the opportunity, yet stifling his rage he ordered the verger to lock the doors and allow no one to depart until after the sermon and collection.

A goodly family was born to Hans and his worthy wife, and all were trained in music, so that an orchestra was formed, made up of the father, mother, and boys and girls. All the instruments used were made by Hans, and these included marvelous fiddles, some with one string and others with twenty; wooden wind-instruments like flutes, and drums to match the players, some of whom were wee toddlers. It is said that the music this orchestra made was more or less unique.

The best part of all this musical exploitation of Hans was that one of his boys, Heinrich by name, applied himself so diligently to the art that he became the organist in the village church, and then he was called to play the great organ at Arnstadt. Heinrich was not a roisterer like his father: he was a man of education and dignity. He composed many pieces, and trained his choruses so well that his fame went abroad as the chief musician of all Thuringia. He held his position at Arnstadt for fifty years, and died in Sixteen Hundred Ninety-two, at which time Johann Sebastian Bach, his nephew, was seven years old.

In his day Heinrich Bach was known as the "Great Bach," and he had two sons who were nearly as famous as himself, and would have been quite so, were it not for the fact that they had a cousin by the name of Johann Sebastian.

Johann Sebastian was a son of Johann Ambrosius, a brother of Heinrich, and Johann Ambrosius, of course, a son of the merry Hans. Johann Ambrosius was a musician, too, but did not distinguish himself especially in this line. His distinction lies in the fact that he was the father of Johann Sebastian, and this is quite enough for any one man, even if Gail Hamilton did once protest that the office of male parent was insignificant and devoid of honor.

Johann Ambrosius was a shiftless kind of fellow who drank much beer out of an earthen pot, and whittled out fiddles, sitting on a bench in the sun. He sort of let his family shift for themselves. Heinrich Bach, his brother, used to speak of him as one of his "poor relations," but at the annual Bach family festival, when a full hundred Bachs gathered to sing and play, Johann Ambrosius would attend and play on a flute or fiddle and prove that he was worthy of the name.

On one such annual reunion he took his little boy, Johann Sebastian, eight years old. The boy's mother had died a year or so before, and after the mother's death the father seemed to think more of his children than ever before—which is often the case, I'm told.

They walked the distance, about forty miles, in two days, to where the festival occurred. It was one of the white milestones in the boy's life—that trip with its revelation of sleeping in barns, singing, and playing on many instruments, dining by the wayside, all winding up with a solemn service at a great stone church, where the preacher gave them his benediction, and the great company separated with handshakings, embracings and tears, to meet again in a year. Johann Ambrosius did not attend the next reunion. Before the Spring had come and birds sang blithely, a band composed of twenty-five played funeral-dirges at his grave—and little Johann Sebastian was an orphan.

Johann Sebastian's elder brother, Christoph, who had married a few years before and moved away, attended the funeral, and when he went back home he took little Johann Sebastian with him—there was no other place to go. The lad was allowed to take one thing with him as a remembrance of the home that he was now leaving forever—his father's violin in a green bag, with a leathern drawstring. On the bag were his father's initials, woven into the cloth by the boy's mother—a present from sweetheart to lover before their marriage.

Christoph was a musician, too, and a prosperous fellow—quite the antithesis of his father. It takes a lot of love to bring up a child, and the miracle of mother-love is a constant wonder to every thinking person. Without mother-love how would the cross-grained, perverse little tyrant ever survive the buffets which the world is sure to give? It is love that makes existence possible.

Christoph wished to be kind to his little brother, but it was a kindness of the head and not of the heart. Only an hour a day was allowed the boy for playing on the violin he had brought in the green bag, because Christoph and his wife "did not want to hear the noise." Then when the boy stole off to the forest and played there, he was waylaid on the way home and well cuffed for disobeying orders. All this seems very much like the Goneril and Cordelia business, or the history of Cinderella, but as Johann Sebastian told it himself in the after-years, we have reason to believe it was not fiction.

Little Johann Sebastian had been his father's favorite, and this fact perhaps made Christoph fear the boy was going to tread in his father's lazy footsteps. So he set about to discipline the lad.

It must be admitted that Johann Ambrosius Bach, who whittled out fiddles in the sun, and who drank much beer out of an earthen pot, was shiftless, but it further seems that he was tender-hearted and kind and took much interest in teaching Sebastian to play the violin, even while the child wore dresses. And sometimes I think it is really better, if you have to choose, to drink beer out of an earthen pot and be kind and gentle, than to have a sharp nose for other folks' faults and be continually trying to pinch and prod the old world into the straight and narrow path of virtue. Yet there is wisdom in all folly, and I can see that the prohibition concerning little Sebastian's playing the violin only an hour a day—mind you! was not without its benefits. Surely it would often be a wise bit of diplomacy on the part of the teacher to order the pupil not to study his arithmetic lesson but an hour a day, on penalty. Of course it might happen occasionally that the pupil in an earnest desire to please, might not study at all, yet there are exceptions to all rules, and we must remember that when Tom Sawyer forbade the boys using his whitewash-brush, the scheme worked well.

One instance, however, might be cited where the law of compensation seems really to have stood no chance. Christoph had a goodly musical library and a collection of the best organ-music that had been produced up to that time. He kept this music in a case, and carried the key to the case in his pocket. On rare occasions he had shown bits of this music to Sebastian, who read music like print when it is easy. The boy devoured all the music he could lay his hands on, and hummed it over to himself until every note and accent was fixed in his memory. He dearly wanted to examine that music in the locked-up case, but his brother declared his ambition nonsense—he was too young. But the boy contrived a way to pick the lock—for a music-lover laughs at locksmiths—and at night when all the household were safely in bed, he would steal downstairs in his bare feet and get a sheet of the music and copy it off by moonlight, sitting in the deep ledge of the window. Thus did he work for six months, whenever the moon shone bright enough to read the lines and signs and marks. But alas! one day the elder brother was rummaging around the boy's room in search of things contraband and he pounced upon the portfolio of copied music. He summoned the offender into his presence. The facts were admitted, and Johann Sebastian had his bare legs well tingled with an apple-sprout. Then the portfolio was confiscated and carried away, despite pleadings, promises and tears. And the question still remains whether "discipline" is not a matter of gratification to the person in power rather than a sincere and honest attempt to benefit the person disciplined.

Nevertheless, Johann Sebastian Bach was working out his own education: he belonged to the boys' chorus at Ohrdruf, as all boys in the vicinity did. Music in every German village was an important item, and the best singers and best behaved members of the village choir were set apart as a sort of select choir—a choir within a choir—and were often gathered together to sing on special occasions at weddings and festivals. Johann Sebastian had a sweet, well-modulated voice, and whenever he was to sing, he carried his violin in the green bag, so he could play, too, if needed. Thus he played and sang at serenades, just as did Martin Luther, many years before, in Johann Sebastian's own native town of Eisenach.

Johann Sebastian's fame grew until it reached to Luneburg, twelve miles away, and he was invited there to sing in the choir of Saint Michael's. The pay he received was very slight, but that was not to be considered. An occasional bowl of soup and piece of rye-bread, and the privilege of sleeping in the organ-loft, all combined with freedom, made his paradise complete. He played on the harpsichord in the pastor's study sometimes; and occasionally the organist, who could not help loving such a music-loving boy, would allow him to try the big organ, and at every service he was present to play his violin, or if any of the other players were absent he would just fill in and play any instrument desired.

Then we hear of him trudging off to Hamburg, a hundred miles away, with only a few coppers in his pocket, to hear the great organist Reinke. He slept in cattle-sheds by the way, played his violin at taverns for something to eat, or plainly stated his case to sympathetic cooks at backdoors. One instance he has recorded when all the world seemed to frown. He had trudged all day, with nothing to eat, and at evening had sat down near the open window of an inn, from which came savory smells of supper. As he sat there, suddenly there were thrown out a couple of small dried herrings. The hungry boy eagerly seized upon them, just as a dog would. But what was his surprise to find, as he gnawed, in the mouth of each fish a piece of silver! Some one had read the story of Saint Peter to a purpose. Young Bach looked in vain for a person to thank, but perceiving no one he took it as the act of God and an omen that his pilgrimage to hear the great organist should not be in vain.

The wonders of Reinke's playing and the marvel of the mighty music filled his soul with awe, and fired his ambition to do a like performance.

Did the great Reinke know as he played that bright Sabbath morning, filling the cathedral with thunders of echoing bass, or sounds of sweet, subtle melody—did he know that away back in the throng stood a dusty, tawny-haired boy who had tramped a hundred miles just for this event? And did the organist guess as he played that he was inspiring a human soul to do a grand and wondrous work, and live a life whose influence should be deathless? Probably not—few men indeed know when virtue has gone out of them.

Perhaps Reinke was playing just to suit himself, and had purposely put the unappreciative, lazy, sleepy occupants of the pews out of his thought, all unmindful that there was one among a thousand, back behind a pillar, dusty and worn, but now unconsciously refreshed and oblivious to all save the playing of the great organ. There stood the boy bathed in sweet sounds, with streaming eyes and responsive heart.

His inward emotions supplemented the outward melody, for music demands a listener, and at the last is a matter of soul, not sound: its appeal being a harmony that dwells within. So played Reinke, and back by the door, peering from behind a pillar, stood the boy.

Bach had been quite content to tiptoe into the church when Reinke played, grateful for the privilege of listening, half-expecting to be thrust out as an interloper. He had gained confidence since then, and now introduced himself to Buxtehude and was greeted by the octogenarian as a brother and an equal, although sixty years divided them. His visit extended itself from one week to two, and then to a month or more, and a message came from his employers that if he expected to hold his place he had better return.

Bach's visit to Buxtehude formed another white milestone in his career. He came back filled with enthusiasm and overflowing with ideas and plans that a single lifetime could not materialize. Those who have analyzed the work of Buxtehude and Bach tell us that there is a richness of counterpoint, a vigor of style, a fulness of harmony, and a strong, glowing, daring quality that in some pieces is identical with both composers. In other words, Bach admired Buxtehude so much that for a time he wrote and played just like him, very much as Turner began by painting as near like Claude Lorraine as he possibly could. Genius has its prototype, and in all art there is to be found this apostolic succession. Bach first built on Reinke; next he transferred his allegiance to Buxtehude; from this he gradually developed courage and self-reliance until he fearlessly trusted himself in deep water, heedless of danger. And it is this fearless, self-reliant and self-sufficient quality that marks the work of every exceptional man in every line of art. "Here's to the man who dares," said Disraeli. All strong men begin by worshiping at a shrine, and if they continue to grow they shift their allegiance until they know only one altar and that is the Ideal which dwells in their own heart.