Free Longing by J. D. Landis Page A

opulence of her fingers.
    As for the training of her ear, it was begun with her closing her eyes and her concentrating on the ears as organs of the body that could be exercised as much as could her fingers or her legs and lungs during the long, silent exercise-walks on which he took her to the wooded park at Zweinaundorf, east out of Leipzig. “The ear can be opened from within,” he would tell her, unsure whether she could hear him but knowing from the increasing looks of pleasure on her face when she listened to him play that she understood and that she was teaching herself how to capture music through the strengthening of her ear.
    In the beginning, he would permit her to play only by ear. This allowed him to gauge her grasp of sound, which was all music was before it was written down, and her to listen to music rather than read it and to close her eyes if she wished and pretend her body was the piano and no one was permitted to draw pleasure from it but herself.
    Once she learned to distinguish all the keys, major and minor, by ear, and to locate and practice triads and dominant sevenths with inversions in all keys as well, and to find the subdominant and dominant chords in each key and to modulate when she wanted or when he demanded from major and minor keys through the diminished seventh, by using the leading note of the dominant, she still was not given music to read but instead was encouraged to improvise and to compose her own pieces, which he taught her to write down and in so doing taught her to read music. He considered it very important to excite a student’s mind and let it develop, not degrade it into a mere machine. She learned more than sixty short pieces by ear, which she could play in any key, in any style, and with the myriad cadences appropriate to the pieces themselves.
    When she was ready to play from music set before her, he started her on Karl Czerny’s Toccata, which most of his students couldn’t play until much further into their studies. And for the improvement of her improvisation, which was expected of all pianists who performed in public, she studied Czerny’s Guide to the Art of Improvisation .
    And she sang.
    He believed not so much that the human voice was the first great musical instrument, as the cliché had it, as that the piano was the first great voice created by humans, toward which all musical instruments had been striving since man first blew through a reed and banged together the bones of an enemy and the Greeks plucked kitharas and the Jews tongued trumps.
    And nothing facilitated unaffected keyboard cantabile better than the singing voice itself. For him, the basis of all pianistic phrasing was song, with its natural rise and fall of tone, its breath points, its expressive accentuation. In each phrase, there was a center of gravity, to be located by the finger in the gut of the piano like a singer in her own belly.
    Thus, the first sounds Friedrich Wieck heard his daughter make, from her body and not solely from the piano that she seemed to grip in her fingers like a hawk its prey, was in her imitating him in the simple E-flat major andantino duet that Pamina and Papageno sing about the blessing of love toward the end of the first act of The Magic Flute:
    In love abides life’s greatest bliss.
    Love guards the heart from life’s abyss.
    â€œYou sing beautifully,” he said.
    â€œThank you, Papa,” she sang, and laughed, because she had meant to speak, and the words had come out as music.
    He laughed as well. “You’ve been listening all along?”
    â€œNot listening,” she managed to say with a bit less lilt in her voice. “Hearing.”
    â€œWhy have you not spoken before this, my child?”
    â€œI was listening,” she answered.
    â€œSing,” he said, because he thought she was confused.
    Clara’s new piano had been made by Andreas Stein in Vienna. Friedrich Wieck enjoyed a profitable relationship