Pianist in the Dark (10 page)

Vienna, January 15, 1783

Dear Doctor Mesmer,

I was very moved by the trust your letter showed me and I thank you. I waited for a moment’s quiet to read it to Maria Theresia, but she was so nervous upon learning that you had written to her that she forbade me from doing so. Many months passed until she asked me what you had to say, one evening last year.

While I was reading your letter to her, she was looking away with her hands at her eyes, so I couldn’t read anything on her face. But once I finished, I saw that she was crying in silence. Tears were streaming down her face. She said nothing and asked me to write to you “when the time was right.” She then locked herself in her room and I didn’t see her until the next morning.

Today I decided to write to you on my own initiative, and I am sorry if you thought this letter would contain a message from Maria Theresia. In fact, she no longer wants to keep in touch with you. Several times I suggested that I answer you, but she’d put her hands to her ears the second I’d say your name and shout, “For me, he is dead!” then stop talking to me for the rest of the day. I am sorry, but I think she is determined to erase from memory this chapter in her existence.

Our life here has changed a great deal. First, we live alone in a house in the same neighborhood as Monsieur and Madame von Paradis, although they are not allowed to come visit their daughter unannounced. She has a cordial relationship with them, but something has definitively changed since their violent irruption at your home. The memory of that will never be wiped away.

Since she is blind again—which, you are right, was a voluntary decision—her life can be summed up in two words: music and piano, one being inseparable from the other. The house is awash in music and musicians. Those with whom she works, those who come to visit, those whom she teaches. It seems unbelievable, but she loves to teach beginners to play. She lays out pieces of cardboard, each of which represents a note, and with these meager tools she works miracles. She has also begun singing and composing again. Concertos, sonatas, and even an opera. Indeed, Herr Mozart did write a concerto for her, the K 456. She plays it with heartbreaking sensitivity.

She has changed considerably since her stay at your home. She is blind again, but how can I explain it? She is not like before. The innocence and candor that made her gentle and frail have now disappeared. She is extremely intense and focused, and at the same time she has a peaceful glow about her. I think she is doing exactly what she wants to be doing. She works at her music tirelessly and can pride herself on knowing by heart, without the slightest hesitation, about sixty concertos as well as a vast repertory of other pieces. All in all, more than one hundred and fifty works. She has found in this ascetic life—she repeats over and over that music is her only religion—a balance that surprises everyone she meets.

When I ask her whether she is happy with her life, she always says: “Nina, I have two pillars in my life: music and you. I know that neither of you will betray me, and this is all I need to be happy.”

I pray to the heavens that this is true, that she is not just telling it to me to reassure me.

I have taken it on myself to write to you and I beg you, Herr Mesmer, not to betray me, for I am doing so only to protect her. If she learned of this letter, she might misunderstand my intentions; I would never be able to bear her distrust. This is only to show you how much I trust you.

I wanted you to hear it from me and not from others: Mademoiselle has decided to go on tour. Of course, I will be accompanying her. We are going to Bohemia, Germany, Switzerland, and then France, where we should arrive by the end of March 1784. I do not know where we will be staying, nor do I know whether you will still be in France by then, but I felt in all honesty that I had to tell you.

For weeks I have been debating the permissibility of what I am undertaking by writing you, but I ended up deciding that I owed you this show of respect.

I must ask you not to mention these projects to anyone. Organizing Maria Theresia’s concert tour has been a long and complicated process, and anything can happen. If it is not a success, if she is bedridden or tired (her health is still fragile and she sometimes suffers attacks of anxiety that can paralyze her for days on end), the tour may be postponed or even cancelled.

Forgive me for having taken up so much of your time and in such a muddled fashion.

With all my respects and loyalty,

Nina

I
N APRIL 1784,
M
ARIA
T
HERESIA GAVE FOUR CONCERTS IN
Paris.

The critics went into raptures over “her brilliant style,” “the extreme intelligence of her playing,” “her rapid and assured execution,” “the lightness of her touch.”

Crowds poured in to see the woman they called “the blind virtuoso.” Out of pity as much as true love of music, they filled the concert halls to hear her.

On Good Friday, April 16, 1784, Maria Theresia von Paradis was the star of the Spiritual Concert, in which Mozart had triumphed six years earlier.

The concert took place before an exceptional audience of influential members of the Court and the crème de la crème of French society.

A description of this evening appears among the notes of her chambermaid, which were found in Vienna and entrusted to the music school that bears Mademoiselle Paradis’s name. In these notes Nina recorded what Maria Theresia would confide to her in the dressing room after each concert.

This is what she wrote on April 16, 1784:

I insisted on wearing a pale pink dress because it is thanks to Marie-Antoinette’s support that I was so warmly received in Paris and pink is her favorite color. I had decided to play for her. As is always the case, I dedicate each concert to someone who affects me. It can be a stranger, someone who coughs in the theater, a scent from backstage, a kind person, or a not-so-kind one, that I met the night before ... This time it was for the Queen and I was overwhelmed, as if I’d set the bar impossibly high.

It was an evening devoted to Mozart, and it is always a pleasure for me to play his work.

I was led to the piano, I sat down, I felt the lights dim, and I started to play.

I was in the middle of the fourth and last piece. Suddenly I felt a draft on my back. A wave of warmth rippled through my shoulder and down my spine. It got warmer and warmer. I was submerged in the heat, and for a few seconds I played better than I ever had in my whole life, with an ardor and an agility that I will never again attain.

Just before the last movement, the heat became unbearable, scalding. My temples were throbbing, my eyes twitching, and my fingers got stiff. I could no longer control them. For the first and only time in my career, I was forced to interrupt a concert.

He was in the audience.

I had felt him approach. No one had noticed him, but as soon as I stopped playing, they did. Just then, the silence in the concert hall changed. It became oppressive, unhealthy. I could feel the busybodies starting to keep score, to take bets: What would happen? Would he come up to me? Would I faint? Would we both cry?

I was thinking only of his nearness. After all these years I caught the scent of his musk and my body began to tremble. At that point, aloud, but no one could have heard me because no sound left my mouth, I said, “Good evening, Doctor Mesmer,” and I started to play again.

I was able to finish the sonata, but I did not do the encore with which I usually close each concert. When I stood up for the applause, I felt him walking away. He was taking with him the memory of a love. Of an illusion.

F
RANZ
A
NTON
M
ESMER NEVER RECEIVED RECOGNITION
from France for his discovery of animal magnetism. In 1784, at the request of Louis XVI, a commission led by Benjamin Franklin was established to study the phenomenon. It concluded that because magnetism could not be observed directly, its existence could not be proved. Mesmer was officially declared an impostor.

He left France in 1785 and returned to his place of birth near Lake Constance. He died of a heart attack on March 5, 1815.

Maria Theresia gave concerts across Europe and met with enormous success in both Paris and London.

In 1785, she returned to Vienna, where she devoted herself mostly to composing. She wrote five operas, six concertos, twelve sonatas, plus cantatas and chamber music.

In 1800, she began teaching. She created a music school for girls in Vienna in 1808.

It is there that she died on February 1, 1824, in her sleep.

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