Robert Schumann

by Martin Geck

  Fortunately, Schumann was precisely what he always demanded his followers should be: a productively “re-creative” artist. As a result, he was able to take the fragmentary aspects of the character offered to him by Hoffmann and generate a Kapellmeister Kreisler who is very much his own brother: a profoundly romantic artist who seeks the essential and the absolute amid common, everyday concerns, finding consolation for the insipidity of the current musical scene by turning to Bach, rhapsodizing about the “high value of music” in his “musical and poetic club,” and suffering untold agonies on account of his inability to give adequate expression to his musical fantasies. In art as in life Kreisler repeatedly came up against his own limitations until he finally went mad. But what is that when compared to the daily madness of society?

  Schumann does not describe this in his Kreisleriana in the same way as he depicts the struggle between the members of the League of David and the philistines in Carnaval. But he writes with Kreisler looking over his shoulder, and it is Kreisler who gives him the courage to indulge a fantastical imagination unsupported by any program and to create a cycle that explores what Franz von Schober had called “life’s untamed circle” with a tremendous wealth of ideas but without the sort of safety harness that Bach and Beethoven had had at their disposal in the form of an initial theme on which their respective sets of variations are based. It is now Kreisler/Schumann who provides the theme.

  But back to Barthes. When he writes about Kreisleriana that he hears only “what beats in the body, what beats the body, or better: I hear this body that beats,” his words are deliberately provocative and intentionally unsupported by any explanation. One of Barthes’s distinguished colleagues in Paris, the linguistician Julia Kristeva, sought to give this phenomenon names that at first sight do not go together: chora and—borrowing an expression from the cultural semiologist Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin—carnival.3 “Chora” is a vague term dating back to Plato and applied to a phenomenon that more recent writers have tried to approach from a psychoanalytic standpoint. For Kristeva, it is the “semiotic bed” of early childhood expressions, especially those dating from the prelinguistic period. These expressions are dictated by physical needs and are only apparently uncoordinated and meaningless. In fact they have their own rhythms, which are determined by the situation of the moment and are innocent of any a priori reasoning. Kristeva includes all of this under the heading of the “genotext,” which she defines as “the sum of unconscious, subjective, and social relations in gestures of confrontation and appropriation, destruction and construction—productive violence.”4

  Processes that, in the case of the “chora,” occur unconsciously in the interaction between mother and child are raised to the level of a conscious principle by the carnival and the culture of laughter, both of which undermine the social order, locating themselves outside the realm of our prevailing morality, and in many respects operating according to the laws of dreams. Art historian Florens Christian Rang, who is remembered chiefly for his powerfully expressionist exchange of views with Walter Benjamin, once declared in this context that “the modern freedom of the life of the mind and of the psyche has leapt into this age of ours in the guise of a Shrovetide caper.”5

  Composers and musicologists have singled out a number of striking aspects of Kreisleriana and spoken of them with admiration. All can be related to current discourse about chora and the carnivalesque. Of particular interest here are the elements of the improvisatory, aphoristic, volatile, fragmentary, incomplete, ambiguous, wildly rampant, confusing, veiled, and sensorily illusory . . . the list could easily be extended. All of these elements may be identified by means of analysis as melodically, metrically, harmonically, and formally specific to this work.6 If I were writing for an audience of specialists, I would be happy to provide any number of relevant examples, beginning with the very first bars, where the movements of the right and left hands are so displaced that not only does the very stability of the metrical structure seem to be threatened, but harsh dissonances are produced. In general, the bass appears to limp behind the rest by as much as an eighth note, but if one tries to bring it into line, then the music becomes meaningless in a different way. In other words, we cannot even rely on the assumption that the shift bears any relation to a previous sense of order that would enable us to make sense of it.7

  The title page of Kreisleriana, op. 16, published by Tobias Haslinger in Vienna in 1838. (Photograph courtesy of the Robert Schumann Museum, Zwickau.)

  This brings us on to a sore point of purely formal analysis, and it is at these attempts to rationalize the situation that Barthes quite rightly expressed his misgivings. It is impossible to do justice to the distinctive features of this—or any other—music by describing them against the background of a deviation from the norm, for far too often such an approach leads to statements of what the work is not about. But this is not true of chora and the carnivalesque as interpretive tools, for these both involve experiences that are not judged by any secondary “normality” but which obey primary structures. Of course, even these tools have their limits, for Schumann’s approach to composition was not naïvely anarchic. He made entirely conscious use of the tension between the rational and calculable on the one hand and a living, sideways attack on the other, even if the instinctual drives of the unconscious may lie behind such a conscious approach.

  This highlights a fundamental difference between Hoffmann’s Kreisler and Schumann’s. In his essays, short stories, and novels Hoffmann was unable to resolve the tension between the ideal of a heavenly art and the “infinite incoherence” of human activity discussed by Jean Paul in his Preliminary School of Aesthetics.8 Indeed, it is possible that it was never his wish to do so. As a result, he vacillates in Tomcat Murr between the world of the pedantic pussycat and that of the chaotic Kreisler: the stylistic device of alienation is intentional, and it is left to the reader to integrate these disparate elements on a higher level.

  Not so for Schumann the musician: however disjointed and fractured his Kreisleriana may seem, the work, when seen as a whole, is fully integrated, even if the superficial listener may not appreciate this fact, which tends to be played down by the proponents of deconstruction. Of course, there are “blows” and the semantic openness that Barthes regards as the work’s essential attributes. But Schumann himself stressed that it nonetheless has a higher sense: “There is a really wild love in some of these movements, as well as your life and mine and many of your glances,” he told Clara in a letter of August 3, 1838.9 Four months earlier he had already written that “my music now strikes me as so strangely intricate, in spite of all its simplicity, it seems so eloquent and heartfelt, and that’s how it affects everyone when I play it for them.”10

  This does not sound like disintegration, and there is no doubt that there are many elements of cohesion in Kreisleriana, elements that specialists have not overlooked, even if they may have been guilty of underestimating their importance. For example: six of the eight pieces are in ternary form, A–B–A, although the straightforwardness of this form may be more apparent from the notes on the printed page than from any impression that a listener may form at an initial hearing. A seventh piece is essentially cast in rondo form. Above all, however, Schumann’s comment on the work’s “intricacy” proves to be accurate, an intricacy evidenced not only by the complexity of the part-writing, which has few counterparts at this period, but also by the motific links between the individual pieces, older material often being taken up again within a new context.

  There is also a wealth of allusions that invest the work with a special significance. A recurrent scalar motif recalls the “Andantino de Clara Wieck” on which the set of variations in the Piano Sonata op. 14 is based:

  The recurrent scalar motif first heard at the start of the second Kreisleriana, op. 16 (“Very inward and not too fast”) and reminiscent of the “Andantino de Clara Wieck,” on which the second movement of the Piano Sonata op. 14 is based.

  One won
ders if Schumann was referring to this when he wrote, “You and an idea of you [play] the main part.”11 In the fifth piece, he explicitly quotes from his own Intermezzo op. 4, no. 1. And finally we have “old Bach.” The contrapuntal writing in the second piece and also in the central section of the seventh is so clearly inspired by The Well-Tempered Clavier that Schumann’s friend Julius Becker could refer specifically to the “link between modern music for the pianoforte and Bach’s classicism” in his book Der Neuromantiker.

  Even more revealing is the comparison that Becker draws between Hoffmann’s Kreisler and Schumann’s: whereas the former “veers forever between the two extremes, the ideal and the real, and whereas the ideal draws him upward, while the real drags him downward, life becomes a torment for him. Schumann, by contrast, is not ruled by these two elements, for it is he who rules over them. He is able to unite them in a tremendous show of strength.”12

  And it is undoubtedly true that Schumann does not introduce his quotations in a flag-waving way, nor does he use irony to refract the work’s many facets. Still less does he construct a series of contrasts. The Clara theme—if we may call it that—emerges from the contrapuntal interiority of the second piece in a way that may be “intricate” but which also suggests an example of “simple” nature. And at the very end of the movement a second “Clara” motif steals in and demands to be heard. It is the same motif as the one that occurs in the opening movement of the Piano Fantasy op. 17: “Take these songs then.”

  With that, Schumann’s identification with Hoffmann’s Kreisler is over. As the composer and creator of Kreisleriana, he is not as inwardly torn as the Kapellmeister who has given the work its name. Rather, he composes in manifold guises. The gestural language is both strict and formless; the delicate poetry of musical sounds appears alongside expressions of wild frenzy; the music affects us physically while also being thoroughly spiritualized. Sometimes it creates the impression of composure and meditation, while at other times it seems distracted. For a moment we feel that everything is bright and clear, only for our sense of time to vanish as we feel ourselves sinking into the morass. The notes are carefully written out right down to the very last nuance, and yet there are passages whose rapid tempo means that we can hear them only as an oscillating layer of sound. Although Schumann does not shut himself off entirely from the idea of objectivity, he does operate with a polyvalent structure whose meaning listeners must establish for themselves.

  Discussing the music of the second third of the nineteenth century, Hugo Riemann—one of the forefathers of modern musicology—observed a movement away from “architectural” forms to their “psychological” equivalent.13 From this point of view, Schumann was able to learn a thing or two from individual piano sonatas by Beethoven and Schubert, notably Beethoven’s Tempest Sonata op. 31, no. 2. At the same time, however, he went substantially further. Although the second of the Kreisleriana pieces may be described as a rondo from an “architectural” point of view, it basically describes an emotional, psychological process that can be expressed in the image of a rondo. The “Clara” theme that we mentioned a moment ago (see music example on page 85) is like a star that shines with a welcoming light before being briefly obscured, only to reappear again from behind the clouds. Sometimes it is present only as a yearning anticipation. According to Adorno, it was in the second of the Kreisleriana pieces that Schumann “first discovered [. . .] the gesture in which music recalls something long forgotten rather than simply unfolding it directly.”14 The result reveals psychological credibility rather than formal rigor. And yet, like all tonal music, Kreisleriana is lit by the sun of traditional harmony, a sun in whose light even what is most remote appears to be connected and to belong together. The principle of concordia discors—concord within discord—is integral to Schumann’s music and cannot be ignored, a circumstance that should give food for thought to those who define romantic aesthetics and the romantics’ view of the world only from the standpoint of philosophy and poetry.

  In his writings on the theory of discourse, Jürgen Link has observed that literary romanticism “consciously” produced “incoherencies and contradictions,” which it did, in part, as an “option in support of civil society and against the bureaucratic central state.”15 But Schumann’s music deserves to have a say here, for what triumphs in this music is not Hoffmannesque or Jean-Pauline incoherence but an admittedly idiosyncratic variety of the “real idealism” that we shall examine in greater detail in chapter 11 and that was to be explicitly introduced into musico-aesthetic discourse a decade after Kreisleriana.16 Although literary scholars refer constantly to music as the principal medium of romantic art, they have devoted too little time and attention to looking for works of music that can be compared with Tomcat Murr and Flegeljahre as concrete, equally valid products of art. In his Kreisleriana, however, Schumann created a work that could contribute materially to discourse on the criteria appropriate to romantic art if only we were prepared to examine it in the sense sketched out above.

  A generation before Schumann, Friedrich Schlegel demanded that the romantics should produce a “progressive universal poetry” that would not be limited to literature but would also include “the sigh, and the kiss that the child, writing poetry, breathes into its artless singing.”17 This demand finds a belated but convincing echo in Schumann’s Kreisleriana that is no less compelling than many of the literary works of the time. By refusing to take over the subject matter of Hoffmann’s Kreisleriana and by eschewing every other kind of imitation, Schumann succeeds in continuing the tradition in the form of “absolute” music, as understood by the romantics, and in so doing he exemplifies the sort of romantic critique of art whose creative and productive element was singled out for particular attention by Walter Benjamin.18

  More than any other work from this period, Kreisleriana is clearly located at a point of intersection. On the one hand, Schumann was still committed to the cosmological thinking according to which music is the expression and reflection of the sense of order immanent in the whole of nature, and to that extent he has no time for the “nihilistic disorder behind which many people seek romanticism.” At the same time, however, he is a true contemporary, ever watchful and ever capable of absorbing into his music the contradictions in his own life and in the lives of others. As such, he may be said to have stolen a march on E. T. A. Hoffmann, who explored these contradictions in his literary works but who remained extremely tame as a composer.

  And so both approaches may be justified. On the one hand, we may hear Kreisleriana as uncontested musical poetry, which is how Schumann advised his fiancée to listen to it, while on the other we may regard it as a bold precursor of modern art beyond any idealistic horizon. Writing under the heading “The Middle Ages of James Joyce,” Umberto Eco examines our “experience of a new and changing image of the world, one which throws imagination and intelligence, sense and reason, fancy and logic into discord.”19 Eco, in fact, was not writing about Kreisleriana but Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. And yet everything must start somewhere. And as far as music is concerned, Schumann’s bold opus is by no means a bad place to begin. Nor am I alone in holding this view, which is shared by the contemporary philosopher and music lover Slavoj Žižek: “It is my assertion that the formal structure of Schumann’s music reflects the paradox of modern subjectivity: it provides a theatrical staging of the barrier or hurdle—the impossibility of ‘becoming oneself’ and of realizing one’s own identity.”20

  The present intermezzo should not be allowed to end with such a negative definition but with some lines from Jean Genet’s prose-poem The Tightrope Walker. If we regard the rope as the music with which the composer feels at one with the dance, then it is by no means absolutely necessary for “him himself” to dance:

  If your love, your skill, and your cunning are great enough to discover the secret possibilities of the wire, if the precision of your gestures is perfect, it will rush to meet your foot (clad in leather): it will not be you that dances but
the wire.21

  Schumann in 1839. This distinctly uninspired oil painting is by an unknown artist who signed himself simply as “Fr. Klima.” It is believed to depict Schumann and is now in the Schumann Museum in Endenich. The sitter is seen wearing a ring in his left ear—at that time a relatively common token of middle-class respectability rather than one of student revolt. One wonders if it represented an attempt on Schumann’s part to impress his prospective father-in-law, Friedrich Wieck, who was stubbornly opposed to the relationship between his daughter and her admirer. (Photograph courtesy of the Municipal Museum, Bonn.)

  CHAPTER 5

  Probationary Years in Leipzig (1835–40)

  What will the new year bring? I often feel a sense of apprehension. To remain abreast of the age and to be equal to all its manifestations, to help the world to progress, to fight, and to remain independent—regardless of all inner and more private turmoil, I often feel quite dizzy.