Longing by J. D. Landis

taste their food even as they swallowed it.
    â€œOr some Schumann,” echoed Herr Richter enthusiastically. “Bravo!”
    The entire school marched to the theater, to which Robert and Herr Richter had preceded them, so that when the students arrived, Robert was alone on the stage, seated at the piano on two boxes, because in tottering combination they best approximated the height of the missing piano bench.
    Robert turned to his fellow students and said, “Who is this?”
    Even as they whispered among themselves, “Who is who ?” Robert began to play.
    He played a complex tune, serious on the one hand and not so much frivolous as gentle on the other, moving between the keys of D minor and F major, a little piece full of generosity and hope but growing in tension until it ended in a kind of indefinable disillusion if definitely not sadness.
    When he finished, his fellow students started to applaud, but Robert held up his hand for them to stop and repeated his question: “Who was that?”
    After a few moments’ silence, one brave soul ventured, “Herz?” and another “Hünten?” and Robert pretended shock at the names of these popular composers at the same time as he shook his head disparagingly but with a smile just as Herr Richter would when he meant to criticize without demeaning the student who had given so foolish an answer.
    Now there was a longer silence, until finally Herr Richter himself ventured, “Was it I?”
    â€œYou pass with honors!” shouted Robert as he raised his hands over the piano and brought them down into a slow melody full of yearning that increased in tempo until it sounded like the sound of a horse rousingly pulling a sleigh through the snow as within it sat a girl whose slim, dark body rose and fell with the rhythm of the ride and whose skirts billowed high in the wind as she gave herself passionately to the music and to the musician himself, who bent ever closer to the keyboard until his lips were practically upon it as his own bottom left the boxes on which he sat so that just as he finished they toppled over and the uppermore came crashing to the floor.
    The students laughed almost uproariously until one among them rose from her seat and was, in fact, forced to hold her skirt high up off the floor as she pushed her way down the row and then flung her skirt down again while nearly running up the aisle and out of the theater.
    â€œIt’s Liddy Hempel!” said several voices together, and many other students sighed in recognition and agreement.
    â€œVery good,” said Robert as he rearranged the boxes and sat down again and began his next piece, which was trembly and dizzy like Robert himself until he moved his hands down the keys to produce chords that were lush and full and teasing in the lack of resolution in their progression and finally angry in their jealousy and yet haughty in their distance from the tonic.
    â€œIt’s Nanni Petsch!” came the nearly universal cry.
    Nanni, rather than rush from the theater, stood gamely and proudly at her place and, turning about so all could see her pretty face and full, lush figure, gave herself to the admiration of the crowd as she would never, despite his apprehension of her in his music, give herself to Robert.
    * The Bee was banned by the Central Bureau of Political Investigation (a more intemperate version of the aforementioned Federal Bureau of Investigation) in 1833, at the very time Robert was planning a revolutionary magazine of his own.
    * What August Schumann admired most about Byron’s life was in fact countererotic. Barely a month before Robert was born, August celebrated with the rest of Europe the news of Byron’s swim across the Hellespont in his successful attempt to duplicate Leander’s nightly journey into the arms of Hero. What Byron could not duplicate was Leander’s notable potency. Indeed, Byron found the journey so enervating that