Robert Schumann

by Martin Geck

  No composer before or since was as adept as Schumann at playing with the possibilities available to him and producing associations and contexts by compositional means, while never becoming insistently illustrative. At the end of the opening song, “In Foreign Lands,” a tiny shift to the Phrygian mode at the words “and no one knows me here any more” is enough not only to conjure up the past in general but, more specifically, to recall a chorale such as Wenn ich einmal soll scheiden, even if the listener is not conscious of the reference. Conversely, it needs only a few bars at the start of “Moonlit Night” to identify the “magical tone” that is then maintained throughout the song, accompanying the soul on its flight between heaven and earth. Charles Rosen has admired Schumann’s ability to conjure up “the erotic vision of a landscape” in this song by means of “absurdly simple forms,” while at the same time remaining capable of portraying “the most complex states of feeling.”24

  My concern, of course, is not to insist on any one “authentic” interpretation of “Moonlit Night” but to express astonishment at the fact that music—this music—is capable of offering such a wide range of interpretations while remaining so concentrated upon itself. Titles such as “In Foreign Lands,” “Moonlit Night,” “In a Castle,” and the tenth song, “Twilight,” which we shall examine in greater detail in the following Intermezzo, merely indicate certain scenes, without allowing us to experience them with our senses, whereas the music offers us a distinctive taste of all that those titles imply. And at the same time it presents us with the whole: it is the res ipsa, as it were, giving us an inkling of what it actually tastes like.25

  Dichterliebe and the Eichendorff Liederkreis may be very different as compositions, but at least their poems share a number of points based on a typically romantic attitude to life. One begins to feel a certain sense of eeriness oneself. Or would it not be better to say: “the man”? From this point of view, it could be argued that Schumann rewards this man—and hence himself—with another important cycle from 1840, Frauenliebe und -leben (A woman’s love and life) op. 42, the title of which echoes the one that Adelbert von Chamisso had given to a sequence of nine poems published in the Musenalmanach für das Jahr 1831. The fact that Schumann set them in their original order underscores their narrative thrust. Chamisso—who amusingly, perhaps, exhibited homoerotic tendencies—describes the journey undertaken by a woman from bashful admirer to beloved, lover, fiancée, wife, mother-to-be, mother, and, finally, widow.

  Even Schumann’s daughter Eugenie reports on a soprano who struggled to come to terms with the fact that two men could so self-evidently flatter their own sex and place such adulation in the mouth of a woman: “Ever since I saw him, I think that I am blind,” the woman announces at the start of the very first song, “him” being “the most glorious of men.” Schumann’s music offers such enthusiasm an adequate platform, maintaining the same tone throughout the cycle, without attempting to establish any evident sense of objectivity or distance.26 But as a composer and future husband Schumann had every right to revel in his newfound status, and the reader will surely not begrudge him that. True, the romantic art song would be unbearable if it presented pictures only of women who live for their menfolk alone, and yet this view reflected a profound longing not only on the part of men but also on that of many women at this time—a similar note was struck by Clara Wieck in diary entries (quoted in the last chapter) that drew a line under her life before she struck out in a new direction as Schumann’s wife.

  Moreover, one of the wonderful things about music is that although it may not demand that we forget the relevant context, it nonetheless enables us as listeners to bring our own contexts to it. When Susanna idolizes her lover in Le nozze di Figaro (Figaro’s wedding), she is addressing both the count and Figaro in terms of a plot that is already multilayered, but at the same time the music makes it clear that what she is actually hymning is the miracle of love and devotion as such. Much the same is true of Schumann: something would be seriously amiss if—after all the romantically refracted humor of Dichterliebe and the Eichendorff Liederkreis—pure feeling were not allowed to express itself.

  Intermezzo IV

  Twilight

  “Twilight”

  Dämmrung will die Flügel spreiten,

  Schaurig rühren sich die Bäume,

  Wolken zieh’n wie schwere Träume—

  Was will dieses Grau’n bedeuten?

  Hast ein Reh du lieb vor andern,

  Lass es nicht alleine grasen,

  Jäger zieh’n im Wald und blasen,

  Stimmen hin und wieder wandern.

  Hast du einen Freund hienieden,

  Trau ihm nicht zu dieser Stunde,

  Freundlich wohl mit Aug’ und Munde,

  Sinnt er Krieg im tück’schen Frieden.

  Was heut’ gehet müde unter,

  Hebt sich morgen neugeboren.

  Manches geht in Nacht verloren—

  Hüte dich, sei wach und munter!

  [Twilight now her wings is spreading,/Trees are shivering and sighing,/Clouds like evil dreams are flying;/What the meaning of my dreading?/If thou hast a darling roe then,/Leave her not alone to graze;/Huntsmen ride in woodland ways,/Voices echo to and fro then./If thou hast a friend, it wise is/At that hour to trust not him;/Eyes and lips may friendly seem,/War he plans in tricky guises./That which sets today in sorrow/Rises new-born on the morrow;/Many things at night miscarry—/Stand on guard, alert and wary.1]

  Do you know this provincial word?” Gottfried August Bürger asked his fellow poet, Christoph Martin Wieland, in 1776. “It means the mass of light when day and night part. It precedes dusk.”2 He was referring to the word Zwielicht (half-light, or twilight), which was only then gaining acceptance in standard High German. As such, it reflects an attitude to life that was starting to view nature as a mood. The word quickly became a literary metaphor. “I was oppressed by a sense of stagnation in my emotions, an apprehensive twilight zone between bright joy and dark grief,” Jean Paul wrote, putting these words in the mouth of one of his first-person narrators who is overwhelmed by romantic impressions in the course of a clandestine journey to the imaginary resort of Waldkappel.3

  In Eichendorff’s Ahnung und Gegenwart (Presentiment and presence), the natural phenomenon of dusk is interwoven with the psychological experience of half-light. But Schumann did not need to know Eichendorff’s first novel, which had first appeared in print in 1815, for the lines quoted at the start of this chapter also appear in a collection of his poems, albeit without an explanatory context. For readers of the time, this may have represented a loss, but for Schumann it was a welcome invitation to immerse himself in a role that he himself had commended to his own audience: that of the “re-creative” listener.

  In May 1840, his struggle to win Clara Wieck’s hand in marriage still had some way to run, and Eichendorff’s lines about the favorite roe deer that should not be allowed to graze alone will undoubtedly have seemed to reflect his own situation, quite apart from the fact that Clara herself had already copied out these and other lines by Eichendorff for her fiancé. But the couple would have been even more profoundly affected by the next two lines in the poem: “Huntsmen ride in woodland ways,/Voices echo to and fro then.” After all, Schumann was familiar with a life filled with fantastical voices of every kind, whether they were interpreted artistically or psychopathologically.

  The way in which a composer could deal with such phenomena had become clear to Schumann on seeing a collection of songs by Gottlob Wiedebein that was published in August 1828. As he wrote in an enthusiastic letter to their composer, they had provided him “with many a moment of joy, and it was through them that I learned to understand and decipher Jean Paul’s veiled remarks. It was through that magical veiling of your musical creations that Jean Paul’s obscure and ghostly sounds finally became bright and clear, more or less revealing how two negatives may become an affirmative.”4 The eighteen-year-old Schumann was presumably referring above all to Wiedebein�
��s setting of an episode from one of his own favorite novels, Flegeljahre, in which Jean Paul writes about Walt’s love of Wina: “‘Oh, if only I were a star,’ thus a voice sang within him.”

  The opening bars of the autograph manuscript of Schumann’s setting of Joseph von Eichendorff’s poem “Zwielicht” (Twilight), May 19, 1840. (Courtesy of the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin—Staatsbibliothek. Photograph: bpk, Berlin/Art Resource, NY.)

  But we do not need to reconstruct all that the young Schumann found so stimulating in the Braunschweig composer’s songs. Far more interesting is the way in which he proclaimed—almost in passing—a whole series of maxims on the aesthetics of lieder writing that he was then to put into practice in his “year of song,” for here an “obscure” text becomes “bright and clear” thanks to the “veiling” composition. We do not need to linger over the “obscure” aspects of Eichendorff’s poem. But to what extent does the composer of “Zwielicht” operate with “magical veilings”?

  If, for a moment, we equate the vocal writing with the “sounds” of the poem (and this appears a legitimate procedure, for the poem is explicitly sung in Eichendorff’s novel), then the piano part would be the actual “musical creation.” And this veils the singing in the truest sense of the term inasmuch as Schumann uses two compositional devices above all. The first is the Bachian polyphony that is evoked here but which Schumann does not pursue, preferring to allow it to vanish into the darkness. With its voices that literally “echo to and fro,” this is combined with an unstable and, indeed, aimless kind of harmonic writing that favors the interval of a tritone, an interval which, three whole tones apart, is regarded as “homeless” within the tonal system.5

  The second of these compositional devices is the “imprecise unison,” a term coined by Adorno and applied to Schumann’s song by Reinhold Brinkmann.6 In other words, the right hand of the piano takes over the notes of the vocal line, but not always simultaneously. Instead, there are often tiny dissonant shifts that create a sense of puzzlement in the listener, something entirely typical of Schumann and that prove particularly effective in combination with the specific text of this song. Although accurately and objectively notated, they can create a hallucinatory effect, tricking the senses with their intentional insignificance and in that way introducing an element of confusion that lies over the song as a whole, affecting not just its structure but also the way in which the listener perceives it.

  Although vocal line and piano accompaniment draw in the main on the same thematic substance, they run along separate lines: the fact that the right hand of the piano paraphrases the vocal line in the way described in the last paragraph may appear to contract this claim, but the contradiction is merely apparent, for the two cannot really agree, and nor are they intended to do so. It is no wonder, then, that with the exception of the final bars, the piano part can often function as an instrumental character-piece. To have the song staged, with the pianist sitting introspectively in the corner of the hall while the singer wanders around, would produce a delightful spectacle. Indeed, we could even go a step further and imagine the scene with Schumann at the piano and Clara as the singer. Certainly, there is talk of marriage in the song: at the words “If thou hast a darling roe then,/Leave her not alone to graze,” the notes E–B–E (in German notation, Ehe = marriage) appear in the left hand of the piano part, but not at the equivalent point in the other three verses.

  It surely requires no further proof that “obscure and ghostly tones” predominate in Eichendorff’s poem and that Schumann’s setting operates with “magical veilings.” It remains only to explain what the two “affirmative negations” make “bright and clear” to the listener. And the answer is provided by Thomas Mann, who struggles to find the superlatives that he needs to praise Schumann’s “incredibly inspired” setting of the poem, an encomium he is more than able to justify.7 Mann, who once famously turned down a request for an opera libretto with the remark that he in any case made “as much music as one can reasonably make without music,”8 felt that as a poet he was inferior to composers. Even the best poetry could speak only in codes and symbols, but music can express this directly through the vibrations of the unconscious.

  Referring to the “difficult secret” surrounding the illness and death of young Hanno Buddenbrook, Mann did not even attempt to draw on such codes and symbols, but settled for a secondhand report:

  Hanno had smiled when he heard his voice, though he hardly knew anyone; and Kai had kissed his hands again and again.

  “He kissed his hands?” asked the Buddenbrook ladies.

  “Yes, over and over.”

  They all thought for a while of this strange thing, and then suddenly Frau Permaneder burst into tears.9

  This is all that the reader learns about this “heavy secret.”

  As a composer, Schumann did not even have to try to fathom the “secret” of Eichendorff’s poem. What use to him was the knowledge that in the novel the young Count Friedrich, “utterly alone,” hears singing in the nearby forest but is unable to locate its provenance (“Twilight now her wings is spreading”)? He did not have to work out in what way Friedrich’s existence was fatally bound together by invisible threads. It was enough for him to read the title—missing from the novel—to invoke a twilight that illustrates no external event but is an expression of the “psychological magic” that in Thomas Mann’s mind was associated not least with the romantic piano-accompanied songs of composers such as Schubert and Schumann.

  God forbid that Schumann’s song should ever appear “bright and clear” in terms of its form, its gestural language or its color, for in that case he would have failed in his objective: his concern, after all, was twilight, not brightness and clarity. It is the musical expression of a lack of clarity that this twilight presents in all its transparency. At the same time, the song would not work without its text, the topoi of which offer as much and as little concretization as listeners need to divine a message and to interpret it in their own terms.

  All of this takes place against the background of a grandiose dialectic that the young Schumann could vaguely sense but which the Schumann of the “year of song” was able to achieve through his work as a composer. However unambiguous the many weighty words of the poem may appear, each listener will interpret them in different ways and make sense of them as he or she thinks fit. And however diffuse the music, per se, may seem, the audience that hears it in the recital room merges to form a single listener for whom everything momentarily becomes “bright and clear.”

  Postlude

  There is no postlude. In Schumann’s works, the postlude often serves to resolve the interrupted cadence or dissonant chord on which the vocal line has come to rest and in that way ensures that the work ends on a note of reassurance. In “Zwielicht,” the postlude is replaced by a surprising envoi. The final line, “Hüte dich, sei wach und munter” (Stand on guard, alert and wary), is articulated by the singer in a way suggestive less of a songlike melody than of a heavily accented recitative that is almost literally punched out. After “Hüte dich” and right at the end, the piano intervenes, first with one brief chord, then with three more, placing itself for the first time in the song entirely in the service of the rhetoric associated with the vocal line.

  The diffuse twilight mood is now broken, and the warning to be on one’s guard emerges, whispered or hissed, from the darkness. Whether the call is addressed to the audience or to the composer, the subject of the song certainly changes its temporal perspective with its final line; ceaselessly circling, ahistorical time now acquires a sense of forward momentum, and a period of waiting “as if from a distance” (one of Schumann’s favorite terms) is transformed into action of the greatest immediacy.

  Eichendorff’s poem could have produced such a shift of perspective in each of its earlier verses, but Schumann was a champion of a rigorously consistent romantic aesthetic that attached great importance to a higher form of wit. According to the opening sentence of the
thirty-fourth of Friedrich Schlegel’s Lyceum Fragments, “A witty idea is a disintegration of spiritual substances which, before being suddenly separated, must have been thoroughly mixed.”10 In this particular case, the wit divides up the diffuse fears that had previously been predominant in order to produce a reality that only the waking, vigilant listener can face.

  This is also a political reality. It matters little in which frame of mind Eichendorff may have written his poem, for in 1840 Schumann would have interpreted it within the context of the prerevolutionary period that culminated in the uprisings of 1848 and 1849, a period during which there was every reason to be mistrustful. Schumann was no hero, of course, only a passionate observer of the events that were taking place all around him. But even as a mere observer, he had every reason to undermine the classical ideals of unity and coherence in the service of the truth.

  Schumann in 1844. This steel engraving was prepared by Auguste Hüssener after an oil painting by Joseph Matthäus Eigner that is no longer extant. Eigner was a portrait painter in Vienna, and Schumann sat for him several times, wearing the fur coat that he had bought for his visit to Russia between January and March 1844. (Photograph courtesy of the Robert Schumann Museum, Zwickau.)