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Meet the Composers
Robert Schumann (1810 – 1856)
Robert Schumann was a German composer and pianist. He was one of the most famous Romantic composers of the first half of the 19th century, as well as a famous music critic. An intellectual as well as an aesthete, his music, more than that of any other composer, reflects the deeply personal nature of Romanticism. Introspective and often whimsical, his early music was an attempt to break with the tradition of classical forms and structure which he thought too restrictive. Little understood in his lifetime, much of his music is now regarded as daringly original in harmony, rhythm and form. He stands in the front rank of German Romantics.
Early life
Robert Schumann was born on June 8, 1810 in Zwickau in Saxony. His father was a publisher, and it was in the cultivation of literature quite as much as in that of music that his boyhood was spent. Schumann himself said that he began to compose before his seventh year.
At fourteen he wrote an essay on the aesthetics of music and also contributed to a volume edited by his father and entitled "Portraits of Famous Men". While still at school in Zwickau he read, besides Friedrich Schiller and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Lord Byron and the Greek tragedians. But the most powerful as well as the most permanent of the literary influences exercised upon him was undoubtedly that of Johann Paul Friedrich Richter. This influence may clearly be seen in his youthful novels "Juniusabende" and "Selene", of which the first only was completed in 1826.
In 1828 he left school, and after a tour, during which he met Heinrich Heine in Munich, he went to Leipzig to study law. His interest in music had been stimulated when he was a child by hearing Ignaz Moscheles play at Carlsbad, and in 1827 his enthusiasm had been further excited by the works of Franz Schubert and Felix Mendelssohn. But his father, who had encouraged the boy's musical aspirations, had died in 1826, and neither his mother nor his guardian approved of a musical career for him.
The question seemed to be set at rest by Schumann's expressed intention to study law, but both at Leipzig and at Heidelberg, whither he went in 1829, he neglected the law for the philosophers, to use his own words, "but Nature's pupil pure and simple" began composing songs.
1830-1834
The restless spirit by which he was pursued is disclosed in his letters of the period. On Easter, 1830 he heard Niccolò Paganini play in Frankfurt. In July in this year he wrote to his mother, "My whole life has been a struggle between Poetry and Prose, or call it Music and Law," and by Christmas he was once more in Leipzig, taking piano lessons with his old master, Friedrich Wieck.
In his anxiety to accelerate the process by which he could acquire a perfect execution, he permanently injured his right hand. Another authority states that the right-hand disability was caused by syphilis medication. Those who claim the former state that he attempted a radical surgical procedure to separate the tendons of the fourth finger from those of the third (the ring finger musculature is linked to that of the third finger, thus making it the "weakest" finger). Regardless, his ambitions as a pianist being suddenly ruined, he determined to devote himself entirely to composition, and began a course of theory under Heinrich Dorn, conductor of the Leipzig opera. About this time he contemplated composing an opera on the subject of Hamlet.
Papillons
The fusion of the literary idea with its musical illustration, which may be said to have first taken shape in Papillons (op. 2), is foreshadowed to some extent in the first criticism by Schumann, an essay on Chopin's variations on a theme from Don Juan, which appeared in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung in 1831. Here the work is discussed by the imaginary characters Florestan and Eusebius (the counterparts of Vult and Walt in Jean Paul's novel Flegeljahre), and a third, Meister Raro, is called upon for his opinion. Raro may represent either the composer himself, Wieck, or the combination of the two (Cla RA + RObert).
By the time, however, that Schumann had written Papillons (1831) he had gone a step further. The scenes and characters of his favorite novelist had now passed definitely and consciously into the written music, and in a letter from Leipzig (April 1832) he bids his brothers "read the last scene in Jean Paul's Flegeljahre as soon as possible, because the Papillons are intended as a musical representation of that masquerade."
In the winter of 1832 Schumann visited his relations at Zwickau and Schneeberg, where he performed the first movement of his Symphony in G minor (which remains unpublished). In Zwickau, the music was played at a concert given by Wieck's daughter Clara, who was then only thirteen. The death of his brother Julius as well as that of his sister-in-law Rosalie in 1833 seems to have affected Schumann with a profound melancholy.
Die neue Zeitschrift für Musik
By the spring of 1834, however, he had sufficiently recovered to be able to start Die Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, the paper in which appeared the greater part of his critical writings. The first number was published on the 3rd of April, 1834. It effected a revolution in the taste of the time, when Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven and Carl Maria von Weber were being neglected for composers who are, today, considered minor figures. The popular taste at the time ran toward flashy displays of technique, without much in the areas of content or ideas; Schumann campaigned to revive interest in the great composers of the past, while also intervening on behalf of new composers who were attempting to create something more substantial. To bestow praise on Chopin and Hector Berlioz in those days was to court the charge of eccentricity in taste, yet the genius of both these masters was appreciated and openly proclaimed in the new journal. On the other hand, the "Music of the Future," as was called the compositional school of Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner, was condemned by Schumann.
Schumann's editorial duties, which kept him closely occupied during the summer of 1834, were interrupted by his relations with Ernestine von Fricken, a girl of sixteen, to whom he became engaged. She was the adopted daughter of a rich Bohemian, from whose variations on a theme Schumann constructed his own Symphonic Etudes. The engagement was broken off by Schumann, due to the burgeoning of his love for the 15-year-old Clara Wieck. Flirtatious exchanges in the spring of 1835 led to their first kiss on the steps outside Wieck’s house in November and mutual declarations of love the next month in Zwickau, where Clara appeared in concert. Having learnt in August of Ernestine von Fricken’s illegitimate birth and fearful that her limited means would force him to earn his living like a ‘day-labourer’, Schumann engineered a complete break towards the end of the year. But his idyll with Clara was soon brought to an unceremonious end. Her father became aware of their nocturnal trysts during the Christmas holidays and summarily called them to a halt.
Carnaval
Carnaval (op. 9, 1834) was one of Schumann's most genial and most characteristic pianoforte works.
Schumann begins nearly every section of Carnaval with the musical notes signified in German by the letters that spell Asch (A, E-flat, C, and B, or alternatively A-flat, C, and B), the town in which Ernestine was born, and are also the musical letters in Schumann's own name. Schumann named sections for both Ernestine von Fricken ("Estrella") and Clara Wieck ("Chiarina"). Eusebius and Florestan, the imaginary figures appearing so often in his critical writings, also appear, alongside brilliant imitations of Chopin and Paganini. The work comes to a close with a march of the Davidsbündler—the league of the men of David against the Philistines in which may be heard the clear accents of truth in contest with the dull clamor of falsehood. In Carnaval, Schumann went farther than in Papillons, for in it he himself conceived the story of which it was the musical illustration.
[ Robert Schumann in 1839]
1835-1839
On October 3, 1835 Schumann met Mendelssohn at Wieck's house in Leipzig, and his appreciation of his great contemporary was shown with the same generous freedom that distinguished him in all his relations to other musicians, and which later enabled him to recognize the genius of Brahms when he was still obscure.
In 1836 Schumann's acquaintance with Clara Wieck, already famous as a pianist, ripened into love, and a year later he asked her father's consent to their marriage, but was met with a refusal. In the series Fantasiestücke for the piano (op. 12) he once more gives a sublime illustration of the fusion of literary and musical ideas as embodied conceptions in such pieces as Warum and In der Nacht. After he had written the latter of these two he detected in the music the fanciful suggestion of a series of episodes from the story of Hero and Leander.
The Kreisleriana, which he regarded as one of his most successful works, was written in 1838, and in this the composer's realism is again carried a step further. Kreisler, the romantic poet brought into contact with the real world, was a character drawn from life by the poet E. T. A. Hoffmann (q.v.), and Schumann utilized him as an imaginary mouthpiece for the recital in music of his own personal experiences. The Phantasie in C (op. 17), written in the summer of 1836, is a work of the highest quality of passion. After a visit to Vienna during which he discovered Schubert's previously unknown Symphony No. 9 in C, in 1839 he wrote the Faschingsschwank aus Wien, his most pictorial work for the piano.
As Wieck still withheld his consent to their marriage, Robert and Clara at last dispensed with it, and were married on September 12 at Schönefeld, near Leipzig.
1840-1849
The year 1840 may be said to have yielded the most extraordinary results in Schumann's career. Until now he had written almost solely for the pianoforte, but in this one year he wrote 168 songs. Schumann's biographers represent him as caught in a tempest of song, the sweetness, the doubt and the despair of which are all to be attributed to varying emotions aroused by his love for Clara. Yet it would be idle to ascribe to this influence alone the lyrical perfection of such songs as Frühlingsnacht, Im wunderschönen Monat Mai and Schöne Wiege meiner Leiden.
His chief song-cycles of this period were his settings of the Liederkreis of J. von Eichendorff (op. 39), the Frauenliebe und Leben of Chamisso (op. 42), the Dichterliebe of Heine (op. 48) and Myrthen, a collection of songs, including poems by Goethe, Rückert, Heine, Byron, Burns and Moore. The songs Belsatzar (op. 57) and Die beiden Grenadiere (op. 49), each to Heine's words, show Schumann at his best as a ballad writer, though the dramatic ballad is less congenial to him than the introspective lyric. As Grillparzer said, "He has made himself a new ideal world in which he moves almost as he wills."
Yet it was not until long afterwards that he met with adequate recognition. In his lifetime the few tokens of honor bestowed upon Schumann were the degree of Doctor by the University of Jena in 1840, and in 1843 a professorship in the Conservatorium of Leipzig, which was founded that year by Felix Mendelssohn.
Probably no composer ever rivaled Schumann in concentrating his energies on one form of music at a time. At first all his creative impulses were translated into pianoforte music, then followed the miraculous year of the songs. In 1841 he wrote two of his four symphonies. The year 1842 was devoted to the composition of chamber music, and includes the pianoforte quintet (op. 44), now one of his best known and most admired works. In 1843 he wrote Paradise and the Peri, his first essay at concerted vocal music.
He had now mastered the separate forms, and from this time forward his compositions are not confined during any particular period to any one of them. In Schumann, above all musicians, the acquisition of technical knowledge was closely bound up with the growth of his own experience and the impulse to express it.
The stage in his life when he was deeply engaged in his music to Goethe's Faust ( 1844- 1853) was a critical one for his health. The first half of the year 1844 had been spent with his wife in Russia. On returning to Germany he had abandoned his editorial work, and left Leipzig for Dresden, where he suffered from persistent "nervous prostration" (now referred to as bipolar disorder.) As soon as he began to work he was seized with fits of shivering, and an apprehension of death which was exhibited in an abhorrence for high places, for all metal instruments (even keys) and for drugs. He suffered perpetually also from imagining that he had the note A sounding in his ears. In 1846 he had recovered and in the winter revisited Vienna, traveling to Prague and Berlin in the spring of 1847 and in the summer to Zwickau, where he was received with enthusiasm, gratifying because Dresden and Leipzig were the only large cities in which his fame was at this time appreciated.
To 1848 belongs his only opera, Genoveva (op. 81), a work containing much beautiful music, but lacking dramatic force. It is interesting for its attempt to abolish the recitative, which Schumann regarded as an interruption to the musical flow. The subject of Genoveva, based on Tieck and Hebbel, was in itself not a particularly happy choice; but it is worth remembering that as early as 1842 the possibilities of German opera had been keenly realized by Schumann, who wrote, "Do you know my prayer as an artist, night and morning? It is called 'German Opera.' Here is a real field for enterprise . . . something simple, profound, German." And in his notebook of suggestions for the text of operas are found amongst others: Nibelungen, Lohengrin and Till Eulenspiegel.
The music to Byron's Manfred is pre-eminent in a year ( 1849) in which he wrote more than in any other. The insurrection of Dresden caused Schumann to move to Kreischa, a little village a few miles outside the city. In the August of this year, on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of Goethe's birth, such scenes of Schumann's Faust as were already completed were performed in Dresden, Leipzig and Weimar, Liszt, as always giving unwearied assistance and encouragement. The rest of the work was written in the latter part of the year, and the overture in 1853.
After 1850
From 1850 to 1854 the text of Schumann's works is extremely varied. In 1850 he succeeded Ferdinand Hiller as musical director at Düsseldorf; in 1851-1853 he visited Switzerland and Belgium as well as Leipzig. In 1851 he revised what would be published as his fourth symphony. In October 1853 he was bowled over by the talent of the 20-year-old Johannes Brahms, who had appeared on his doorstep and spent a month with the Schumanns. During this time Schumann, Brahms and Schumann's pupil Albert Dietrich collaborated on the composition of the 'F-A-E' Sonata for the violinist Joseph Joachim; Schumann also published an article, 'Neue Bahnen' (New Paths) hailing the unknown from Hamburg as 'the Chosen One' who would 'give ideal expression to the Age' . In January 1854 Schumann went to Hannover, where he heard a performance of his Paradise and the Peri organized by Joachim and Brahms.
Soon after his return to Düsseldorf, where he was engaged in editing his complete works and making an anthology on the subject of music, a renewal of the symptoms that had threatened him before showed itself. Besides the single note he now imagined that voices sounded in his ear. One night he suddenly left his bed, saying that Schubert and Mendelssohn had sent him a theme - actually a reminiscence of his Violin Concerto - which he must write down, and on this theme he wrote five variations for the pianoforte, his last work. (Brahms published the Theme in a supplementary volume to the complete edition of Schumann's piano music, and in 1861 himself wrote a substantial set of variations upon it, for piano duet, his op.23.)
On February 27, 1854 Schumann threw himself into the Rhine. He was rescued by some boatmen, but when brought to land was determined to be quite insane. Schumann requested to be taken to an asylum and Dr. Franz Richarz's sanitarium in Endenich, a quarter of Bonn, was decided upon. After decades of speculation by pathologists, musicians, biographers and music lovers, the publication of Dr. Richarz's records on his most celebrated patient point conclusively to the effects of tertiary syphilis as the underlying cause of Schumann's many physical and mental illneses. This, in addition to his introspective, withdrawn character and the treatments he endured, particularly mercury applications, contributed to his ultimate demise.
He died on July 29, 1856. He was buried at the Zentral Friedhof, Bonn. In 1880 a statue by A. Donndorf was erected on his tomb.
According to studies by the musicologist and literary scholar Eric Sams (1926-2004), Schumann's symptoms during his terminal illness and death appear consistent with those of mercury poisoning. Mercury was at the time a common treatment for syphilis.
From the time of her husband's death, Clara devoted herself principally to the interpretation of her husband's works, but when in 1856 she first visited England the critics received Schumann's music with a chorus of disapprobation. She returned to London in 1865 and continued her visits annually; with the exception of four seasons, she appeared each year. She became the authoritative editor of her husband's works for Breitkopf und Härtel. It is rumored that she and her good friend, Johannes Brahms, destroyed many of Schumann's later works that they thought to be tainted by his madness. However, apart from the Five Pieces for Cello and Piano we know of no other pieces actually destroyed. As a result of their survival most of the late works, particularly the Violin Concerto and the Third Violin Sonata, both from 1853, have entered the critical and performing repertoire as recognized masterpieces.