Robert Schumann (1810-1856)

Schumann's life: A Brief Biography

Robert Schumann was born in 1810 in the small German city of Zwickau in Saxony. His father was a bookseller and publisher, and in this environment Schumann learned to love literature-his reading habits from early in life onward have been described as "promiscuous" for their breadth and catholicity. At age 9 he heard the great pianist Ignaz Moscheles (1794-1870), and a little later was taken to a performance of Mozart's The Magic Flute. These two experiences added a musical dimension to his sensibilities steeped in romantic literature, and he began to compose, to improvise and perform on the piano, and to participate in unofficial concerts and entertainments as an outlet for his musical powers. But his interest in literature and literary production never abated. He wrote and published both poetry and prose during his teenage years, and was a founding member of several student societies at around the age of 15 (one of which was devoted to mastering the skill of fencing!). Emotional upheavals wracked him in the following years-he had powerful crushes on at least three girls when he was sixteen, and in the same year his father and one of his sisters died. All of this left traces on his writing of the time, and he began to develop some of the passions that occupied him throughout his life: the writing of Jean Paul [Richter], the music of Schubert, a taste for champagne, and the almost obsessive keeping of a diary.

On graduating with high honors from school, he was prevailed upon by his mother to enroll as a student of law at the University of Leipzig. This is a subject in which he had no interest, and whiled away his time writing, composing, and improvising without attending any lectures at all. Indulging the introspective side of his nature to this degree caused him to have dark thoughts about going insane, and for the rest of his life he suffered bouts of depression and occasional suicidal thoughts. His emotionally wrought nature can be judged by his roommate's report that when Schumann learned of Schubert's death he wept the night away. Although during this year he began to study piano with the famous Leipzig-based teacher Friedrich Wieck, Schumann was excited to leave Leipzig when he learned of a law professor at Heidelberg who had also written a book on musical aesthetics. His year in Heidelberg allowed him to participate in more amateur music societies and an active social life, and he scored a brilliant success with his playing of a set of variations by Moscheles; upon hearing the violin virtuoso Paganini play, he was further inspired and asked his mother whether he could switch to music for career training. She sought the advice of Friedrich Wieck, with whom Schumann had already studied. Wieck responded that Schumann's gifts were such that he could become one of the leading pianists of the day within two or three years if he applied himself-which Wieck doubted he had the discipline to do. A six-month trial period was entered into, however, and at age twenty Schumann took up residence at Wieck's own house. Schumann was not in the end able to conform to some of Wieck's demands on his personal lifestyle-he continued to smoke and drink heavily, for example-and because of Wieck's constant touring with his child prodigy daughter, Clara, there was friction and dissatisfaction on the pedagogical side as well. Schumann continued to study from other books and teachers, but his plans for a career as a piano virtuoso had to be abandoned when he began to have problems with his hands and fingers-either because of the incorrect or overly strenuous use of a device intended to help strengthen the fingers or because of the effects of mercury used to treat syphilis, which Schumann had presumably contracted during his various amorous escapades. At about this time Schumann began to write music criticism. His first famous essay in this genre was the one which greeted Chopin: "Hats off, gentelemen, a genius!" Schumann's music criticism in these early years was couched in a literary format, with various personages of Schumann's own invention-with names such as Eusebius, Florestan, Maestro Raro, and the like-discussing music and life. His originality in this field caused him to be prominent in launching a new music journal, the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, which soon became one of the leading music periodicals of its time. Schumann was the editor of the journal for about ten years, and wrote many famous and influential reviews of new music by Berlioz, Chopin, and many others.

In 1834 Schumann fell in love with a new piano student of Wieck's, Ernestine von Fricken, to whom Schmann was soon engaged. From his association with her emerged two of his most famous piano works-Carnaval, whose themes are based on the musical pitches A-S-C-H (German musical spellings which can yield the pitches A, E-flat, C, and B, or alternatively A-flat, C, and B) after a town to which Ernestine had departed, and the Symphonic etudes, virtuosic variations on a theme by her father. But within a few months Ernestine had been replaced in Schumann's affections by Clara Wieck, nearly 10 years his junior and so only 15 when they were beginning to become romantically involved. Friedrich Wieck was furious with this development because he was deeply offended by Schumann's loose living, and over the next several years Clara was compelled to distance herself from Schumann at her father's commands. But true love prevailed, and ultimately, after a protracted battle in court, the two were allowed to marry in 1840.

Up to this time Schumann's published output had been exclusively devoted to piano music, but in 1840, just after the mostly favorable court ruling allowing he and Clara to marry, he turned to song, writing about half of his eventual output in this genre during that year, including the four most famous cycles, among them Frauenliebe und -leben and Dichterliebe. Not long thereafter, at Clara's urging, he also returned to orchestral music (an early overture in G minor had been one of his major projects and successes as a younger man). This direction was perhaps also inspired by his 1839 visit to Vienna, in part to meet Schubert's brother Ferdinand, with whom he discovered the manuscript of the "Great" C major Symphony. In any case, 1841 was a year devoted to orchestral music-the pieces written at the time include what we now know as the first and fourth symphonies, the Overture, Scherzo, and Finale, and a fantasy for piano and orchestra that later became the first movement of his piano concerto in A minor. In 1842 Schumann suffered from severe depression at times, but his compositional emphasis was on chamber music (the three string quartets, the piano quintet, and the piano quartet), and the following year found him working at choral music, the major project being the completion of the oratorio Das Paradies und die Peri. Schumann made his first appearance as a conductor in the premiere of this work in Leipzig, where he had become a professor at the conservatory. In both capacities, alas, his performance was less than scintillating. After the initial bliss of wedded life he became aware that he was regarded by many as less important in the musical world than Clara, who was one of the finest pianists of her time, and this tension within the family caused both of them pain and tended to plunge him into dangerous depression. When in 1844 the directorship of the Leipzig Gewandhaus concerts came open on Mendelssohn's departure and Schumann was passed over for the post, his depression became quite severe, so much so that listening to music was acutely painful, and he and Clara moved to Dresden. Over the next several years his spirit for composition returned as numerous important works emerged (among them his opera Genoveva and the Second Symphony), and in 1848-50 he attained one of the most prolific bursts of compositional activity in his life, with pedagogical, chamber, orchestral (Third Symphony, Cello Concerto), choral (Scenes from Goethe's "Faust"), and piano (Waldszenen) works to set beside many songs. Despite his continued fame as a composer, Schumann had a hard time even in Dresden in establishing any kind of official position and renown, and felt underused and underappreciated in the city in which he was residing (Wagner was one of the leading lights). So when a position as municipal music director at Düsseldorf was offered to him, Schumann took it. The engagement was not a happy one-despite their reverence for his achievements, the musicians there found Schumann to be inadequately skilled as a conductor, and numerous outbursts and attempts to replace him took place in the coming years. In the summer of 1853, the 20-year-old Brahms visited the Schumanns at the suggestion of the violinist Joseph Joachim. Both Schumanns were deeply impressed by his music and his playing, and Robert, who had not been writing music criticism for nearly a decade, wrote an article announcing him as the new Messiah of music for the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. Thereafter Brahms came to revere Schumann and his memory. In a light-hearted moment he once claimed to have learned nothing from Schumann save "how to play chess" (which gives insight into another of Schumann's hobbies and past-times). But Schumann's health and sanity had been declining, and early in 1854 Schumann attempted suicide by throwing himself into the Rhine River. He was saved, but then institutionalized in an asylum near Bonn for the last two years of his life. During this time he was not permitted to see Clara, but Brahms and other friends were sometimes emissaries for her. They sometimes found him in good spirits, at other times involved in obsessive-compulsive behavior (making alphabetical lists of cities, for example), and at other times quite mad. When it finally became clear that he was dying, Clara was permitted to see him; on her arrival he gave her a tender look, but passed away a few days later at the age of 46.

Schumann's musical language

No-one else in the nineteenth century composed such profoundly affecting quiet music as did Schumann-"Träumerei" (Dreaming) from Scenes from Childhood is a particularly famous example among many. It has sometimes been said that Schumann's best music is like late Beethoven not in its outward techniques but in its effect on the listener, who feels drawn into a vast inner world of expression. The famous painting by Fernand Khnopff called "Listening to Schumann," which pictures a woman leaning forward, with averted face and hand on her forehead while a piano and pianist's hands can be seen behind her, is a perfect image of the kind of inward reflection that Schumann's music inspires. Some of the greatest examples of this kind of profundity occur in the Fantasy, op. 17. The great pianist Josef Hofmann, after giving a brilliant performance of the piece, deflected the heartfelt awe of two of his admirers by saying, "You know, I played that work for Anton Rubinstein when I was sixteen or seventeen. When my lesson was over, Rubinstein said to me: 'My boy, you play this piece quite perfectly, but you won't know much about it for twenty years.' It's now over thirty years, and I know there are worlds in it I haven't begun to explore."

Schumann's great admiration for Schubert meant that the kind of harmonic ambiguity and magic that Schubert cultivated was second nature to Schumann. This dimension was one that Schumann developed a bit further in some ways-for example, he wrote a number of pieces that begin out of the main key of the piece for various expressive reasons-among them to give a sense of beginning in media res ("in the middle of things"), but also in very subtle ways to convey the meaning of texts. (One scholar has aptly pointed out that the introduction to the song Mondnacht provides a musical equivalent of the subjunctive tense in which the poem begins.) Schumann was more "German" than Schubert, however, in his treatment of rhythm, texture, and form. Schubert was a freshet of natural-sounding melody, while Schumann put this in more rigorous and sometimes square form. The magical opening piece of the op. 12 Fantasy Pieces (Evening) is a perfect example-it unfolds in regular four-bar phrases, but the density of texture makes it hard to determine whether the meter is that of the underlying accompaniment (duple) or the melody (triple). This kind of surface rhythmic ambiguity can be found in many places in Schumann's writing; whether it is the purpose of such passages or not, they help to offset the potential monotony of regular phrasing and Schumann's frequent use of predictable ternary form.

As a literary man, Schumann was devoted to the interpenetration of literature and music. This takes many forms-words or letters become musical pitches or melodies (ABEGG Variations, Carnaval), or recreations of the personalities in the critical societies he himself invented like the dreamy Eusebius, the impetuous Florestan, and others (Carnaval again, Davidsbündlertänze, and so on), or descriptions of fictional characters of others (a creation of E. T. A. Hoffmann is depicted in Kreisleriana). There are also numerous references to extraneous musical material-the letters BACH in the second movement of the second symphony, allusions to themes by Clara, musical depictions of Chopin and Paganini (in Carnaval), an old German tune in the last section of Papillons, a sly reference to La Marseilles (then banned in Vienna!) in the opening movement of Faschingsschwank aus Wien (Carnival Jest from Vienna), Beethoven's An die ferne Geliebte appears in the first movement of the Fantasia in C (the piece was originally intended to be played at the unveiling of a Beethoven monument), and so on.

Schumann's more adventurous works involve new sorts of forms to supplement those with which he felt most comfortable, such as ternary form; the way that the "Fourth" Symphony (at one stage called a Symphonic Fantasy) and the First as well involve breakthrough moments that go beyond traditional sonata form are impressive. The first movement of the Piano Concerto and the finale of the Second Symphony (in which Beethoven's An die ferne Geliebte (To the distant beloved) gradually emerges over the course of the movement) show him to be adept at thematic transformation in its early stages, well before it became a preoccupation of Liszt and Wagner.

Schumann and the piano

Few composers have been more single-minded about a single genre of composition than was Schumann during the 1830s. During that decade his published output consisted entirely of piano music. Schumann's piano music has a distinctive flavor within the world of 19th-century piano music. His early pieces, among them his official Opus 1, the variations on ABEGG (notes that spell the name of a girl with whom he was acquainted), included quite a few of the flowery, notey runs that mark bravura playing at the time. There are later pieces, too, or at least passages in them, that are overtly showy-the Toccata, the Symphonic Etudes, the second of the novelettes, the fearful leaps in the coda of the second movement of the Fantasia in C, and so on. (Perhaps the most impossible of Schumann's piano pieces is the opening of his G minor sonata (#2) which is marked "As fast as possible" only to add the instructions "faster" and "still faster" in the coda!) Schumann's piano style, however, is different from those adopted by his great contemporaries Chopin and Liszt: both of them were renowned performers who developed distinctive pianistic techniques that advanced the technical capacities of the instrument and of those who played them; in addition, their techniques were intended to be showy in nature. By contrast, Schumann's piano music can often be difficult to play, but is more chordal and often more consistent in figuration than the more pianistically elaborate efforts of Chopin and Liszt. Schumann cultivates thicker textures than they, specializing in inner voices that emerge from active accompaniment.

The great innovation in Schumann's piano music is his development of the poetic cycle. This begins already with his official opus 2, Papillons (Butterflies), in which a series of fragmentary or very short pieces are juxtaposed to create a larger composition-and in which the music made to rub shoulders is very different from one moment to the next. No-one can be quite sure how Schumann came up with the idea of doing this-it has been speculated that the idea came from his love for Schubert's waltzes, which, though published in groups, were probably conceived individually. Schumann, however, probably played them in one sequence, hence the idea of linking even more differentiated music came to be. In Papillons, Davidsbündlertanze (Dances of the League of David), and Carnaval the individual pieces are often quite short (the average is about a piece a minute). Eventually, though, Schumann decided to link longer works-the Fantasy Pieces op. 12 and Kreisleriana are half-hour cycles that consist of only eight pieces each, and the eight Novelettes op. 21-which Schumann pointedly classified as a cycle-are mostly large-scale pieces on their own that would take 45 minutes to perform in sequence. (As a result, they have been programmed individually during this month in order to appreciate their individual beauties more thoroughly.) Ironically, the longer of these pieces consist of many smaller sections. The 8th novelette is a good example-it contains a rhapsodic opening section, a contrasting section, a return and intensification of the opening, another contrasting section which trails off into a passage marked "voice in the distance," then a concluding section with many interlocking parts over which the "voice in the distance" makes a climactic appearance. The half-hour-long Humoresque is an even longer piece of this kind, and the first movement of the Fantasia, despite some nods toward sonata form, is similarly rhapsodic.

Schumann and Clara

The love that Clara and Robert undoubtedly had for one another was put to the test by their marriage. As has already been seen, Robert felt like a fifth wheel when he travelled with her on concert tours; bourgeois sentiments that his wife should not have to have public work and jealousy that she overshadowed his own public reputation added to his depression, even though he naturally loved her playing and felt guilty when their mutual recognition that his compositional career came first interfered with her practice time. For the first several years of their marriage they kept a joint marriage diary in which they were able to communicate on paper what their perceptions were of what was going on in their lives; it makes interesting (if sometimes painfully personal) reading, since it and later diaries chronicle everything from reality to aspirations, joy to despair, frequency and nature of sexual relations, and everything in between. It seems to have been therapeutic for the two individuals to be able to set down in writing a considered version of what they were living. Nevertheless, Clara's interest in Robert's public success seems also to have been a strain at times. The many occasions on which Robert quotes some of Clara's compositions in his own can perhaps be seen as private endearments, but it is less clear how Clara perceived his whole-scale appropriations and reworkings of her own music (as in the opening movement of Robert's Piano Concerto, which is strongly based on the first movement of Clara's Piano Concerto, also in A minor!).

Schumann and other composers

The first composer to whom Schumann became devoted was Schubert. Although the latter died before Schumann could meet him, Schumann was a tireless promoter of the cause of Schubert as the Austrian master's output came slowly to be discovered in subsequent years. As a writer on music in his day, Schumann came to know many of the composers whose music he promoted. Chopin, Berlioz, and Mendelssohn are among those with whom he had generally pleasant relationships; the latter was indeed one of his closest friends, although there is record of Schumann painting Mendelssohn with an anti-Semitic brush on occasion and of resenting and striving to contextualize any great acclaim the more popular man received. Schumann's relations with Wagner during Dresden in the 1840s were basically cordial, but were not helped by Wagner's honest and justifiably discouraging assessment of the libretto of Genoveva. Schumann questioned Wagner's technical competence after reading through the score of Tannhäuser but was willing to change his mind and admire its dramatic impact once he saw the work produced. Schumann dedicated his greatest piano work, the C major Fantasia, to Franz Liszt, who reciprocated some years later by dedicating the B minor sonata to Schumann. This relationship was thwarted by Clara, however-Liszt, despite his enormous musical gifts, represented the kind of showmanship that Clara despised. Schumann's influence in launching the career of the young Brahms is often remarked. Among earlier composers, Schumann was in the generation that tried in alternative ways to come to terms with the legacy of Beethoven; Mozart too was admired, even though Schumann heard even Mozart's most passionate outpourings as dainty. In the late 1840s and beyond Bach became an important part of Schumann's musical pantheon.

Schumann and song

Among Schumann's most beloved works are his songs. A few early ones apart, the dam burst in 1840, a year in which poems by Heine, Chamisso, Eichendorff, and others attained immortal settings from his pen. Schumann's song style is the first major advance over Schubert's in the development of the German art song (or Lied). His song cycles can be seen as equivalents of his poetic cycles for piano-especially in Dichterliebe the songs are brief and variegated. But in both Dichterliebe and Frauenliebe und -leben the conclusion is not a song but a piano postlude which recalls happier earlier music (in Dichterliebe much of that earlier music had also been a postlude). It is important to remember the Romantic notion that music was the most expressive of all the arts, that it could say what nothing else could, and consequently that it was left to have the final word in many of Schumann's songs via relatively extended postludes (of which the endings of those two cycles are merely the most extreme examples).

If Dichterliebe is not the finest song cycle written in the 19th century, it is the only one that can be considered in a class with Schubert's Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise. From its vague opening song, which neither begins or ends in the home key, to the nimble-spirited songs like "Die Rose, die Lilie…," the intimate ones like "Wenn ich in deine Augen seh'," the bitter ones like "Ich grolle nicht," and the harrowing "Ich hab' im Traum geweinet" (the only song to meet the challenge of late Schubert), this is Schumann at his most expressive. It is always dangerous to read a composer's life into his works, but it should be noted that on his 29th birthday, less than a year before he composed this cycle and at the height of the legal battle to obtain Clara's hand in marriage, Schumann wondered in a letter to Clara whether "perhaps the greater part of my life is already behind me. In any event, I won't live to be very old; this I know for certain. Violent passions have raged within me….". Heine's ironic poetry and Schumann's highly charged musical imagination join forces in this cycle to suggest just how violent those passions were. Schumann's prophecy concerning his lifespan was sadly to come true. He would no doubt have considered his career a failure, but grateful musicians ever since have been able to rejoice in and be regenerated by the echoes of those passions that reside in his music.