Robert Schumann

by Martin Geck

  August Schumann was fifty-three when he died in 1826, leaving his wife to bring up their fifth and last child, Robert, on her own. Like most mothers, she wanted only the best for him and did what she could to foster his talent, while insisting that he should study law on leaving school, a course of action that he adopted only reluctantly. Although mother and son remained close until her death in 1836, their relationship was not free from tension. Johanne Christiane tended to dwell on the darker aspects of life, while her son reacted with feelings of guilt and occasional defiance:

  Dear Robert,

  Your last letter left me so deeply shaken that ever since I received it I have sunk back into my old state of depression. [. . .] I am not reproaching you for this, because this would not get us anywhere—but I cannot approve of these views of yours, still less can I approve of your actions. If you examine your life since your dear father’s death, you will have to admit that you have lived only for yourself. How will it all end?12

  Schumann’s mother was reacting to a letter in which her son had asked for her permission to be allowed to put an end, once and for all, to his “twenty-year struggle between poetry and prose or, to put it another way, between music and jurisprudence.”13 The tone of Schumann’s reply was not exactly considerate:

  If I were to stick to law, I’d shoot myself from boredom as an unpaid assistant. Heaven forfend, but I could one day go blind, and then music would be the finest form of deliverance for me. [. . .] I have to send a number of franked letters to Heidelberg but I don’t have a penny to pay for the postage. What will the world think of me? My piano is horribly out of tune, but I can’t afford a tuner etc. etc. I even lack the money to buy a pistol with which to shoot myself.14

  “But to be serious for a moment,” Schumann goes on in the same letter, a sentiment that sounds plausible when we recall that five years earlier, in 1825, his elder sister, Emilie, had indeed taken her own life. The fact that Schumann failed to attend his mother’s funeral in 1836 after she had repeatedly appeared to him in his dreams “warning” him or “angry” with him15 should not necessarily be seen as an attempt on his part to distance himself from her or as a sign that he could not handle the situation, still less as an act of ultimate self-emancipation, for he had arranged to meet Clara Wieck in Dresden at that very time. Following the meeting, he wrote to Clara on February 13, 1836: “This was an emotional day for me for many reasons—the public reading of my mother’s will and the accounts of her death. But behind it all is your radiant likeness.”16

  Schumann was hoping to find in the then sixteen-year-old Clara the sense of home that his parents’ house could no longer offer him, for all that it had previously afforded him excellent opportunities to develop. While living with his parents, he had never had any financial worries, his mother was an amateur singer, and his father had done all he could to encourage his son’s aptitude for music—an aptitude that, like his love of poetry, had made itself felt at an early age. Eugenie Schumann recalled how as a child her brother had delighted their mother by singing the song “Schöne Minka, ich muß scheiden” “with tender, splendid emphasis and a fine sense of rhythm.”17 Then, when he was about seven, he began piano lessons with the local organist, Johann Gottfried Kuntsch. For a time he also had cello and flute lessons with one of the municipal musicians, Carl Gottlieb Meißner.

  Although Schumann also needed to practice, he still had plenty of opportunities to indulge his favorite musical pastime and to improvise on the piano. His famous review of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, which he published in 1835, opens with a reminiscence of a scene from his “earliest childhood,” when “late at night, while everyone in the house was asleep, he crept into the music room as if in a dream and, with his eyes shut, went over to his old piano, now ruined, and played chords and wept.”18

  Truth or fiction? Whatever the answer, Schumann did not have to content himself with communing with the piano in the intimacy of his own drawing room; he had ample opportunity to take part in the musical life of Zwickau, which included Lutheran church music, regimental band music, and a theater where opera performances were given at irregular intervals. In 1823, for example, the young Schumann attended a performance of Weber’s Der Freischütz that inaugurated the new theater in the Clothiers’ Hall. No doubt he also took an interest in the subscription concerts held in the function rooms at Däumler’s Tavern, as well as in the open-air concerts in the grounds of the town’s beer cellars. These performances were presumably notable for their limited resources and imperfect technical standards, but they would have been good enough to provide the young boy with a more than adequate degree of musical stimulus.

  Schumann was eleven when, standing at the piano, he accompanied a public performance of Friedrich Schneider’s popular oratorio Das Weltgericht (The last judgment) at the town’s St. Mary’s Church. That same year—1821—he also began to appear in public at the Literary and Musical Entertainments that were held at the city’s grammar school, or Lyceum. At his first appearance there he played a set of Pleyel’s piano variations for four hands with one of his fellow pupils at the school, and by 1828 he was sufficiently adept to perform an arrangement of Friedrich Kalkbrenner’s Piano Concerto op. 61.

  In 1822—inspired by his participation in the performance of Schneider’s Das Weltgericht—Schumann produced a setting of Psalm 150 for soprano and contralto soloists, piano, and orchestra. It was his first completed composition. In a diary entry of 1846, he wrote, “I am almost ashamed to look at it now; I lacked all knowledge and wrote it just as a child would have done; but also without any outside stimulus.”19 It was not least in order to equip himself with such knowledge that he formed a school orchestra in 1823. It met at his parents’ house, using the parts that Schumann was able to order from his father’s bookshop. In a series of texts to which he gave the collective title Blätter und Blümchen aus der goldenen Aue (Leaves and florets from the golden meadow) and in which he accounted for his life as a young artist, he made the following entry under the heading “Musical Notes”: “On 7 December [1823] the first musical evening’s entertainment was held at my place under the directors Robert Schumann and Carl Praetorius.” The performance began with a sinfonia for strings, horns, and flutes by Ernst Eichner. Schumann made a conscientious note of the names of all the performers, adding, “This piece, although a little old-fashioned, passed off very well and with no mistakes.” The seventh item on the program was a set of variations for piano and flute by Johann Wilhelm Wilms, described by Schumann as “a splendid composition; invariably playful with no sense of stiffness; admirably performed by Hoffmann on the flute; his tone is bright, refined, and clear; his sense of rhythm firm and gratifyingly good; his cadenzas flawless. I’d almost say that it is a shame that this man doesn’t have another teacher.”20

  There is no doubt that the thirteen-year-old Schumann was not only a musician but also a critic and, above all, a writer and poet. As a result, the Blätter und Blümchen volume contains not only notes on musical events in the town but also a whole range of literary texts of one kind and another: poems, an attempt at a drama headed Der Geist (The ghost), two descriptions of nature and a travelogue in the form of fictional letters, “the sayings of classical Greek and Latin authors,” the sort of lines more usually associated with autograph albums, dedications and aphorisms, excerpts from newspaper articles and from Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart’s Ideen zu einer Ästhetik der Tonkunst (Ideas on a new aesthetic of music), a survey of poetic meters, and a list of the “Lives of Famous Musicians.” Of course, Schumann too hoped to become famous very quickly, with the result that we find him copying out a newspaper article on Mendelssohn, who, only a year older than himself, was already a national celebrity.

  It is hard to resist a smile when we read the heading that Schumann gave to his play Der Geist: “Otto the Murderer’s Departure from This World. Sentence Handed Down by the Schwarzenberg Criminal Court on the Day of His Execution, 27 November 1823.” This was the date not
of some quasihistorical event but the day on which Schumann wrote down the scene or declaimed it to some listener or other. No less amusing is the echo of many a literary model that occurs in the following poem:

  Einst wenn die Abendröthe

  des schönen Lebens ist.

  O euch ihr Menschen wünsch ich

  des Lebens lange Frist

  Dieweyl ihr seyd zum Segen

  Der Menschen auserkoren.

  Doch wenn ihr auch vergehet

  So lebt ihr immer fort.

  Im blauen Himmelsraume

  Dort wo die Frommen sind.21

  [One day the dusk of fairest life/Will shroud this sullen vale of tears./A long and healthy life till then/I wish all men and women here/On earth as long as it’s your fate/To be a blessing to mankind./But even when you pass away,/You’ll still live on forever more/Within the empyrean vault/Where God’s own congregation dwells.]

  What matters here is not the literary quality of this or that product of the young Schumann’s imagination and whether or not it lies above a notional average, for there have always been thirteen-year-olds capable of remarkable achievements in this regard. What is fascinating is something else, namely, the resolve with which the young boy worked away at a game plan that he had already sketched out in his head: he was determined to become an artist of genius. This view of himself already bears within it a number of traces of decadence, something that Schumann’s school friend Emil Flechsig may have been exaggerating only a little when he recalled from a distance of half a century that

  even in his early youth Schumann had felt an insane preference for men of genius who were destroyed by their work. The eccentric Lord Byron had earlier been his ideal, his wild and self-destructive life striking him as having an infinite grandeur to it, while the fantastical life and suicide in Jena of Franz Anton Sonnenberg—famous as the poet of Donatoa—left a tremendous impression on him. As early as the 1820s he already knew about the period of almost forty years that Hölderlin had spent in a benighted state of mental imbalance, a state to which he referred with feelings of awe. Beethoven’s shock of unruly hair over his somber countenance seemed to him to be a true artist’s face that he was almost fond of imitating.22

  Schumann’s image of himself—and it is this that concerns us here—was marked by the awareness that however productive they may be, the fantasies associated with megalomania are no guarantee of an artist’s successful career. Rather, such an artist has to work hard and strive tirelessly to educate himself. If Schumann was able in adulthood to resist the destructive forces within him for such a long time, this was due in no small part to the fact that as a child he had already worked out a picture of himself, which, undoubtedly modeled on that of his father, ensured that well-planned and systematic activities would serve as a bulwark against the fears that threatened to overwhelm him. This helps to explain why the young Schumann not only wrote poems but prepared a detailed list of them—it was effectively the first catalog of his works. And not only was he inspired by the very idea of men of genius, he was only fourteen when he was allowed to assist his father on a projected “Portrait Gallery of the Most Famous Men and Women of All Nations and Ages.”

  From this point onward, Schumann’s literary ambitions increased and even appear to have eclipsed his musical interests. At the same time, the focus of his attention shifted from more or less naïve poeticizing and theatrical improvisation to an interest in current literary discourse. In December 1825 he joined forces with ten of his fellow pupils at the Lyceum to form a Literary Society aimed at “initiating” its members into “German literature.” The minutes of this society, which in the main were kept by Schumann himself, list a total of thirty discussion evenings between 1825 and 1828, the year in which its members all left school. Among the subjects discussed were Schiller’s plays, Friedrich Schlegel’s treatise on early German literature, and Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation.

  In 1826, Schumann began an initial volume of “German Essays” that ran to fifteen separate entries, starting with an “Observation, Written from a Beautiful Region near Zwickau.” The fourth essay was entitled “On the Randomness and Futility of Posthumous Fame,” the sixth “The Resignation of Ariadne on Naxos,” the seventh “Address on the Close Relationship between Poetry and Music,” and the fifteenth “Why did Tragedy not Flourish among the Romans?” These fifteen essays represent a selection of those that he wrote as part of his regular assignments at school, making it clear that even as a schoolboy Schumann drew no distinction between duty and inclination.

  Although the Literary Society’s program occasionally featured romantic writers, it was above all in his private reading that Schumann departed most markedly from the Lyceum’s canonical syllabus. His personal preferences were for E. T. A. Hoffmann, Ludwig Tieck, and Jean Paul, whose Flegeljahre (The awkward age) became his self-styled “bible” after 1827. A year later he noted in his “Hottentottiana,” as he called his student diary, “I often wonder where I would be if I had never got to know Jean Paul.”23

  This represented a considerable advance on the classics that were the prescribed texts at the Lyceum and that Schumann undoubtedly took very seriously. Just as the young people of the Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) generation had identified with Goethe’s Werther, so the avant-garde of Schumann’s age was passionate about Jean Paul’s two vexing figures of Vult and Walt, to say nothing of Hoffmann’s wild-eyed genius Kapellmeister Kreisler and the romantic fairytale characters from Tieck’s Phantasus. Here we already have a premonition of the “new poetic age” that we shall shortly examine in much greater detail.

  First, however, we need to get Schumann through his school-leaving examination on March 15, 1828. This must have been a comparatively painless experience, not least because it was not until 1830 that Saxon schools introduced a proper test for final-year students. Relatively poor results in math meant that he failed to achieve the highest grade of 1a, but he nevertheless left the school with a personal recommendation from his headmaster, Friedrich Gottfried Wilhelm Hertel, on whose revised edition of Forcellini’s great Lexicon totius latinitatis he was invited to work, an invitation he evidently felt unable to refuse. In a letter, he explained that this meant “a fair amount of corrections, copying out excerpts, looking things up, and reading through Grüter’s inscriptions.” It was hard work, but it also meant that “a few extra pennies” found their way into his purse.24 At the public graduation ceremony he recited a poem, “Tasso,” that he had written in the meter of a Horatian ode. It was his final work in German and begins: “The twilit day lay resting, and off into the silver/Evening’s clouds the cerulean swan flew, smiling.” According to a later reminiscence, Schumann was supposed to deliver the poem from memory but stumbled, though without being in the least disconcerted by his lapse.

  In spite of his fondness for purple prose and poetry, Schumann was also capable of parody. Three months after he left school—and perhaps encouraged by the new freedoms associated with student life—we find him parodying Goethe’s “Erlkönig”:

  Was raspelt es dort in den Spänen[,]

  Vater, mir ist so schwül.

  Das Kind weinte bittere Thränen[,]

  Weinte der Thränen zu viel.

  Sey ruhig, mein Kind, in den Spänen

  Naget wohl eine Maus.

  Der Vater weint selber Thränen[.]

  Es ward ihm selber so graus.25

  [What’s rustling in the shavings there?/Father, I feel so hot./The child was weeping bitter tears,/Of which there were a lot./Calm down, my child, it’s just a mouse/That’s gnawing through the wood./His father, too, was all in tears,/Scared witless where he stood.]

  This may be no masterpiece, but it is a useful indication of the fact that at this date Schumann was a contented individual with a positive attitude toward life, a point underscored by a letter he wrote to his friend Emil Flechsig on December 1, 1827, in which he referred to an outing to Schneeberg, where a group of his friends entertained their f
ellow drinkers at a local hostelry. They sang student songs and recited Schiller’s poem “The Glove” at the request of a portly peasant—Schumann was later to set this poem to music. He himself took his place at the piano: “I played a free fantasy on Fridolin [by Schiller]; the peasants opened their mouth in surprise as my fingers moved so tipsily over the keys. At the end, there was drunken dancing: we spun the peasant girls round to the music.” Inevitably the occasion was invested with a literary note and described as “worthy of a Van Dy[c]k.”26

  Schumann must have felt particularly at his ease in the home of the Zwickau businessman Carl Erdmann Carus, where he was a welcome guest not least because of his contribution to his host’s musical soirées, when Schumann was introduced to the string quartets of Viennese classicism. It was here, in 1827, that he got to know Agnes Carus, the wife of a local physician, and soon fell hopelessly in love with her, sending her lengthy poetic effusions. Earlier objects of his undying affection had been Nanny Petsch and Liddy Hempel: “Three goddesses stood on the Olympus of my dreams,” he wrote in his Pilgrimages of Youth: “Agnes at the front, Nanni in the middle distance and Liddy in the background, which sounds almost ambiguous.”27

  We would be doing the young Schumann an injustice if we saw him only as a bookworm or as a loner obsessed with his own artistic interests, for it is clear that he was also interested in politics. In a detailed and carefully minuted interrogation, his headmaster wanted to know if he was aware of the activities of a secret student society. Since the events in question dated back to 1821, the now fourteen-year-old Schumann was able to deny any knowledge of the matter, a denial that under the circumstances sounds plausible. But the whole incident brought home to him from an early age the concrete implications of denunciation and persecution.28 It was presumably from his father that Schumann inherited his lifelong political ambitions, however vague these ambitions sometimes may have been. As the frontispiece of the 1819 volume of his Memoranda for Educated Readers, August Schumann chose a portrait of the student Karl Ludwig Sand, who shortly beforehand had caused a furor with his politically motivated murder of the reactionary writer August von Kotzebue. The young Schumann could also see Sand’s likeness hanging in his parents’ drawing room.