By Stuart Mitchner
I’ve been composing a hymn to Wikipedia in my head, something along the lines of the Fredonia National anthem in Duck Soup, with Harpo Marx on the electric harp while Groucho does a soft shoe. When you’re paying tribute to Wikipedia, you take a sharp left at July 29, 904 AD, the sacking of Thessaloniki, the site of your friends-forever meeting ten centuries later with an Italian girl in the back of a truck bound for Istanbul. Spin the Wiki wheel, and it’s the Siege of Damascus, where you lost your way on the Street Called Straight, the Siege ending on July 29, 1148, with a “decisive crusader defeat,” leading to the “Disintegration of the Second Crusade,” which roughly coincided with the week in 1963 that you hitched a ride from Damascus to Jerusalem, which Wikipedia says was sacked by the Neo-Babylonian Empire in 587 BC.
“The Previous Century”
I was about to refer to two great artists of the “previous century,” composer Robert Schumann and painter Vincent van Gogh, when I realized that the 19th ceased being the “previous” on January 1, 2000. I have to admit I find it hard to leave two World Wars, Babe Ruth, the Beatles, The Catcher in the Rye, and the Kennedy assassination, among many other events, in the previous century, having lived most of my life there. So I’ll stick to specifics: the composer died on July 29, 1856, the painter on July 29, 1890. I should add that one of the most admirable characters in American cinema was born on July 29, 1892, Willam Powell, at his bright, unflappable best in My Man Godfrey, last seen in Town Topics on May 27 as the detective Nick Charles.
A Love Letter from 1838
…we shall indeed lead a life of poetry and blossoms, and we will play and compose together like angels, and bring gladness to mankind.
—Robert Schumann to Clara Wieck, April 1838
“Träumerei” (Dreaming) is the seventh in a series of piano pieces about childhood (Kinderzenen op. 15) that Schumann composed in 1838 for the pianist Clara Wieck, who would become his wife three years later when the couple finally prevailed against the Draconian opposition of Clara’s father.
This prophetic bouquet of music (the Schumanns had seven children) delivered the desired effect. Clara “could not forget” Kinderzenen, writing from Paris, where she was giving a concert: “Your beautiful melodies are constantly singing in my head.” For decades after Schumann’s death, she performed the deceptively simple composition that has proven to be one of his most beloved. “Träumerei” has a searching quality, poignant, thoughtful, haltingly, bravely dreaming, finding its way. A hundred years later it will land in a concentration camp, played by the cellist and Auschwitz survivor Anita Lasker-Wallfisch for the amusement of the notorious Nazi physician Dr. Josef Mengele (“I suppose he was a musical man”). And the same melody that apparently enchanted the man they called the Angel of Death is so revered in Russia that it was aired on the 50th anniversary of VE Day, in addition to being played 24/7 at war memorials all over the country, including the one in Volgograd/Stalingrad.
In La La Land
“Traumerei” is also the subject of a passionate performance on the violin by Mickey Mouse in a 1930 cartoon called Fiddlin’ Around. As he plays, Mickey is overcome with emotion, weeping and blowing his nose. And then there’s Song of Love, Hollywood’s take on the Schumann’s romance, in which “Träumerei” is the “song” of the title, Robert and Clara’s song, so you know there has to be at least one scene in which Paul Henreid, who was Ingrid Bergman’s husband in Casablanca, performs it for a tremblingly, diaphanously exalted
Katherine Hepburn.
Too Deep for Tears
Schumann’s Piano Quintet in E-Flat was written for Clara during the first year of their marriage, with Clara performing it for the first time in January 1843 in Leipzig. The second movement, In modo d’una marcia, contains one of the most poignant melodies ever written, one that I think surpasses even “Träumerei.” Coming in what is generally assumed to be a funereal context, it’s a melody equal to the love theme from Berlioz’s Romeo and Juliet, or the andante from Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante. The music aches, pulses, yearns, rends the heart, and if there was ever a time when Schumann might have realized the marital bliss he imagined for himself and Clara (“And when you are standing by me, as I sit at the piano, then we shall both cry like children”), it may have been when they shared this piece of music. No need to cry, not when the little theme does all the crying, not as children cry, but like Wordsworth’s “thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”
“I Love This Painting!”
I can still hear this startled shout, although it’s been almost 10 years. The site was the Princeton University Art Museum during an exhibit centered on Cézanne. The shouter looked to be in his sixties, clearly not your typical museumgoer. Perhaps he’d come in because it was free, or he might have been dragged there by his wife. Which could explain the hint of surprise in the sudden, muted outburst of feeling wherein the word “love” erupted from someone not given to using it casually.
When I saw the work he was gazing at, I thought to myself, almost said it aloud, “Van Gogh! Who else!” Of all the paintings on display, Tarascon Stagecoach (1888, no longer in the collection, alas) was the one someone new to the galleries would fall for, especially if beholding it for the first time, in person, face to face. That’s how it is with van Gogh and how it’s always been, at least for me, since the day at 19, when, clueless to the core, I wandered into an Amsterdam museum filled wall to wall with van Goghs. Other artists, you look at the paintings. Van Gogh, you stand face to face with the painter. You don’t have to see him, though he’s the surely the most familiar of them all and, granted, you may be seeing Kirk Douglas, the star of Lust for Life, and not the face in the self-portraits. The painter’s power is in the thickness of the pigment, the primal energy, the joy of the blue of sky and red of the coach, the gouty creamy thereness of the brushstrokes that bulge on the canvas, as if he’d only just been there and departed. You don’t think of a painter with a brush but a man with bare hands, and van Gogh is the painter who makes you want to grab some brushes and oils, or some fingerpaints, or crayons, or anything at hand, and start making something.
“Delicate”
There’s a passage in one of van Gogh’s last letters where the stress on a single word caught my attention, especially given the overwhelming physicality of the work I saw that day in Amsterdam. Writing to his mother that he was “absorbed in that immense plain with wheat fields up as far as the hills, big as the ocean, delicate yellow, delicate soft green, the delicate purple of a tilled and weeded piece of ground, with the regular speckle of the green of flowering potato plants, everything under a sky of delicate tones of blue, white, pink. I am in a mood of almost too much calm, just the mood needed for painting this.”
After a quick online check, I can report that “delicate” is délicat in French and delicaat in Dutch. Repeated four times in this brief passage, the word gives you a sense of the depth, intensity, and, well, delicacy of van Gogh’s art.
Last Walks
Vincent van Gogh died in 1890, 34 years after Schumann, also on the 29th of July, apparently from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The letter quoted is near the end of the edition of The Letters selected and edited by Ronald de Leeuw (Allen Lane/Penguin Press 1996). The complexities surrounding van Gogh’s walk into the woods with a pistol is pretty well sorted out in his Wikipedia.
What Robert Schumann apparently intended to be his last walk, on a chilly Monday morning in February is recounted online in BBC music magazine. Leaving his home in Dusseldorf still wearing a floral-patterned dressing gown and slippers, and hatless in cold weather,” he “walked at least ten minutes through pouring rain to a wooden pontoon bridge on the River Rhine.” Having no money to pay the toll collector, “he offered his silk handkerchief in lieu and was allowed to continue. The specific details of what happened next are blurred by history. At some point on his way across the bridge, Schumann halted, stepped over the wooden railing and entered the Rhine, possibly via one of the pontoon boats below.” He spent the final 58 months of his life in an asylum. When Clara visited him two days before his death at 46, “ ‘He smiled at me,’ she recorded, ‘and wrapped his arm around me — never will I forget that…’ “ Although she lived on another 40 years, she never remarried.
Meanwhile van Gogh lives on in the culture. I’m surprised there isn’t a comic book Superhero of Art based on him. (Maybe there is?) One of my favorite surfacings was the nickname of the St. Louis Cardinals’ great basestealer of the 1980s, Vince Coleman, with the “van” capitalized — Vincent Van Go!