The Virtuoso by Sonia Orchard Read Free Book Online Page A

and gold clock-face striking eleven, bells chiming through the elms. In the pale cyan moonlight everything around me had a clarity that I’d never noticed before; I could see the outline of every leaf on every tree in the square as if it had been etched with ink, and each blade, needle or frond dazzled an entire spectrum of greens. The urgent call of a tawny owl, sharp and woody as a flute, shotacross the treetops, piercing the rustling breath of the wind through the leaves. And coinciding with this new awareness of everything I saw, felt and heard around me, I thought of Clara Wieck.
    Clara was only ten years old when Robert Schumann moved in with her family to take lessons from her father, the renowned but autocratic teacher Friedrich Wieck. Schumann was determined to become the greatest pianist alive. Clara, however, became her father’s top student, and as a teenager she spent years touring around the continent with him, becoming Europe’s most celebrated young pianist.
    Schumann eventually gave up his dream of becoming a performer and shifted his energies to composition. He moved out from the Wiecks’, but returned to visit often, especially to see Clara, with whom he’d fallen madly in love.
    When Clara was sixteen Schumann asked Wieck for his daughter’s hand in marriage; Wieck, livid at the prospect of his daughter throwing away her future by marrying a struggling composer, ordered Schumann out of the house, telling him never to contact his daughter again. Months later Schumann wrote what he called a ‘deep lament’ for Clara, a piece called ‘Ruins’. A composition that was later to become the first movement of the Fantasie opus 17, dedicated to his friend, the composer-pianist Franz Liszt.
    I imagined Clara during this time, locked away at the piano by her father for days and weeks on end. He took her touring from country to country, month aftermonth, filling concert halls wherever she went. In the midst of this schedule of rehearsals, performances and travel, she would receive a message from Schumann, hand-delivered behind her father’s back by a confidante—page after page of music: Fantasie, Davidsbündlertänze, Kinderszenen, Kreisleriana, Fantasiestücke, Humoreske, Novelleten…
    Clara finally replied to Schumann, echoing his feelings, and the two became secretly engaged. She continued touring with her father for several more years but then, against his wishes, married Schumann in the winter of 1839, eleven years after their first meeting.
    When I think of this story there is one instance I keep returning to over and over, one moment when Clara’s life changed forever. August 1837: Clara is at home in Leipzig and receives, via a friend, another manuscript that Schumann has composed for her: the Fantasie opus 17. Clara’s father is out sending telegrams arranging her forthcoming tour of Austria, and Clara is supposed to be doing her morning practice. She sits at the piano and places Schumann’s music in front of her— To Clara— scribbled in a hand she knows so well. There are blobs of ink splattered over the page. She takes a closer look: the stems of the notes are frantic scratches; the arpeggios in the left hand are huge clusters written in a single flurry; the phrase lines sweep euphorically above. At first she doesn’t even play a note, just glances over the script, the tumble of notes that rise and fall and glide along thepage carving out brilliant patterns, a solo melody singing pleadingly over the top. Then she lifts her hands to the piano and begins, her fingers close to the keys, playing the chords from the wrist, just as her father has always taught her. As her fingers move around the notes the music is unlike anything she has ever heard before. The rolling semi-quavers in the left hand, the fortissimo falling five-note phrase in the right. And from that moment she knows both her love and her fate are sealed.
    I remember little of the performance at Sadler’s Wells that Friday