Robert Schumann

by Martin Geck

  Schumann’s decision not to pursue his goal of writing an oratorio on the subject of Martin Luther may not represent a particularly grave loss to the world of music, even though we should dearly like to know how he would have depicted this “great man of the people” in a way that would have been intelligible to “peasants and burghers” alike. In a letter that he wrote to Pohl in June 1851, Schumann explained that he would “strive” to strike a similar note in his music, which would “avoid artificiality, complexity, and counterpoint as far as possible and be simple and memorable, preferring to create its impact by means of rhythm and melody.”13 Perhaps he was thinking of Ludwig Börne’s parable Le rocher et l’éponge (The rock and the sponge), in which Luther the “rock” was played off against Heinrich Heine, the “sponge.”

  In the event Schumann preferred to turn to a typically romantic subject, the story of a rose that takes on human form to enjoy the pleasures and sufferings of the children of this earth. A setting of a poem by the Chemnitz court official Moritz Horn, it was given the title Der Rose Pilgerfahrt by Schumann, who described it as a “fairytale” related to the earlier Paradise and the Peri “in terms of its form and expression, but more rustic and more German.”14

  Schumann himself proposed the ending whereby the rose is raised to a higher existence, an ending that reflects his fondness for parables of redemption:

  How would it be if after Rosa’s death an angelic choir were to strike up: Rosa has not been turned back into a rose but into an angel. [. . .] The ascent from rose to young woman and thence to angel strikes me as poetic and also points to that doctrine about the higher transformations of creatures to which we are all so attached.15

  The effusively sentimental words of Der Rose Pilgerfahrt may be on a lower level than the texts of the choral ballads, which are based for the most part on Uhland’s pithy poems, and yet the music still has something to offer us even today: performances given in an intimate setting make it clear that Schumann’s musical language is not indebted to the bourgeois world of Biedermeier art but evinces a wealth and range of expression that does not need to fear comparison with ostensibly more advanced music of the period. Listeners willing to treat Der Rose Pilgerfahrt as a series of numbers imbued with the spirit of a choice lieder recital and happy to dispense with any sense of drama will find Schumann at his best here.

  For Schumann, 1851 was an exceptionally productive year, including, as it did, three purely orchestral works of a distinctly popular stamp: the overtures to Schiller’s Die Braut von Messina (The bride of Messina) op. 100, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar op. 128, and Goethe’s Hermann und Dorothea op. 136. Schumann wanted to offer the subscribers of his orchestral concerts repertory works that would be easier for them to grasp than symphonies, while not forgoing his claims to want to educate them. The overture to Hermann und Dorothea is famous enough but tends to be undervalued on account of its somewhat garish colors. It includes—for the third and last time in its composer’s career—a quotation of the Marseillaise, here evidently intended as an ironic allusion to the recent news of Louis-Napoléon’s coup d’état in France. Only the most alert of listeners will appreciate how original this overture is in its ability to negotiate a path between the poles of topicality and universal validity.

  There is no one who can compare with Schumann in this regard—in part because few others have achieved this balancing act, and certainly not, as Schumann did, within the space of only five days, and in part because we now live in an age when “serious” composers are eager from the outset to create a monument to themselves, precluding distractions of any kind. Even Brahms considered himself too good to curry favor with his public—his Academic Festival Overture op. 80, which was written to thank the University of Breslau for conferring an honorary doctorate on him and which is a loosely structured work based in part on student songs, is the arguably inevitable exception to this rule. Schumann, conversely, needed no external incentive to write his popular Fest-Ouvertüre mit Gesang über das Rheinweinlied (Festival overture with singing on the Rhine wine song) op. 123, which was performed at the conclusion of the 1853 Lower Rhineland Music Festival. On that occasion sections of the audience seem to have taken seriously the soloist’s invitation “O add your voices” and, thinking that it applied to themselves, joined in the singing, so that in this case we may well speak of a genuine “folk chorus” from the composer’s pen.

  In the field of the piano-accompanied song, too, Schumann wrote works that were both political and popular in character. It is no accident that in January 1851 he set a text by Johann Gottfried Kinkel for the first and last time in his career: the song in question was the Abendlied (Evening song) op. 107, no. 6. Kinkel was a revolutionary who had been sentenced to life imprisonment for his part in the Baden Uprising, but—as Schumann may have heard—he had just escaped from Spandau Prison and fled to England. Perhaps the composer smiled or at least drew his own conclusions when setting the lines “O hear, cast aside what offends you and all that makes you afraid.”

  In general, Schumann took a remarkable interest in the fate of his fellow human beings during his years in Düsseldorf. His opp. 103 and 104 songs, for example, are settings of poems by Elisabeth Kulmann, who had died in 1824 at the age of only seventeen. He was profoundly touched by the way in which so young a woman had reflected in verse on her short life, and he prefaced each of the op. 104 songs with a commentary of his own. The fact that he took these poems seriously as literary artifacts has been interpreted as a symptom of his waning critical faculties, although it has to be said that he had always been enthusiastic about second-rate writers, so that his admiration for Elisabeth Kulmann is not particularly exceptional.

  The subject of a valediction to the world is by no means confined to Elisabeth Kulmann’s verse, for the Poems of Mary Stuart op. 135, which Schumann found in an anthology of early English poetry, revolve around the same theme. Behind the Four Hussar Songs op. 117 that are settings of poems by Nikolaus Lenau is an outspoken critique of the business of killing, while the melodrama, “Die Ballade vom Haideknaben” (Ballad of the boy on the heath) op. 122, no. 1, describes a boy’s cruel murder.

  Of course, death is not the only subject in which Schumann took an interest during his years in Düsseldorf, but it is striking that death now entered the world of ideas that had previously been centered on love and nature, not least in the lieder written during the “year of song” in 1840. The proverbial “lyrical self” that had set the tone in the Eichendorff and Heine cycles was starting to fall silent and was being replaced by a greater number of poems of a more sententious kind. Even nature is conjured up in what Reinhard Kapp has called “politically charged metaphors” rather than in more immediately empirical ways: “Spring,” “Streams,” “Storm,” Cloudless Sky,” “Morning,” “Forest,” and “Hunt.”16

  As for the music itself, a comparison between the songs of the Düsseldorf period and those from 1840 reveals an absence of the great cyclical outpourings inspired by Kerner, Eichendorff, Heine, Rückert, and Chamisso, but the range of expression is greater, the gestural language either more emotional or more naïve—in each case intentionally so. If Schumann had effectively been singing to himself in 1840, he was now singing for others. And yet Schumann the tone poet has by no means disappeared. The music of the Kulmann settings is touching, and the songs of the Mary Stuart cycle—Schumann’s swansong in the field of the piano-accompanied solo song—can easily stand comparison with the earlier anthologies in terms of their intensity, an intensity fuelled by the composer’s ability to develop these songs from the speech rhythms of the poems. The composer Aribert Reimann was so impressed by the concentrated simplicity with which Schumann treated the theme of a farewell to the world that in 1988 he prepared a version of these songs for mezzo-soprano and chamber ensemble.

  The songs for voice and piano that Schumann wrote in Düsseldorf straddle the boundary between the political and popular on the one hand and the elitist on the other, whereas the three
late violin sonatas, the violin concerto, and the Songs of Dawn are unashamedly elitist. A new recording of the three violin sonatas (in A Minor, op. 105; D Minor, op. 121; and A Minor, with no opus number) by Carolin Widmann and Dénes Várjon reveals their hidden qualities for neither performer attempts to impose any neoclassical suavity on them, but instead they explore their elements of brooding and forlornness, while bringing both passion and countless interpretive refinements to their reading.

  A comparison between Schumann’s late chamber music and his early piano pieces reveals an identical impulse against a different background, a background that is no longer the masked ball at which Florestan and Eusebius meet Vult and Wina but the empty vessel of sonata form. But it was still a question of translating “rare states of mind” into the language of poetry. And if we examine the three sonatas in the order in which they were written, we shall observe an increasing tendency on Schumann’s part to move in the direction of what we might call a “noble decadence”—it will be recalled that Baudelaire was working at this time on Les fleurs du mal (The flowers of evil). In short, “decadence” is not to be equated with personal decline, although listeners who think they can identify this quality in the final sonata can certainly appeal to much later remarks by Clara and Joseph Joachim. On the other hand, those same listeners will find it impossible to adduce any technical criteria that are of any real use in this context.

  Rather, the term “decadence” should be taken to mean Schumann’s increasing willingness to allow hints of gloom, forlornness, abruptness, and even absence to infiltrate his music. Although the A Minor Sonata op. 105 begins with a movement that remains entirely within the tradition of the romantic and neoclassical Schumann with its performance marking of “with an impassioned expression,” the final movement already starts to play up: “I was unable to bring to it enough of the restive, surly tone of the piece,” Wasielewski reported after playing through the piece with Clara Schumann on September 16, 1851.17 She, too, spoke of a “rather less graceful and more recalcitrant movement.”18 Schumann must have deliberately turned his back on the traditional idea of a hymnlike or carefree ending, an idea virtually indispensable in music designed to be effective in public.

  Schumann’s next contribution to the medium, the D Minor Violin Sonata op. 121, begins by striking a note that is neither emphatic nor ingratiating but features a neobaroque dialogue between violin and piano that is brusque and somber by turn. Its thematic writing truly makes sense only to the listener who knows that the work was dedicated to the violinist Ferdinand David, whose surname is the starting point for the series of notes D–A–F [for “v”]–D that figures prominently in the piece. Schumann had long been familiar with such a device, but in the present case it is also symptomatic of what Hans Kohlhase has called a “kaleidoscope technique”19 involving motific and thematic procedures and ultimately concerned with brooding and with marking time. No less unusual is the way in which piano and violin communicate with one another: on the one hand there are passages in which the two instruments pursue their own separate interests with a degree of independence that suggests that they are neither willing nor able to listen to one another, while on the other hand they are constantly drawn together by the D–A–F–D motif. A partnership as dissociative and at the same time as associative as this is unique in the history of music.

  The final work in this group of three is the A Minor Sonata WoO that started life as the F–A–E Sonata written jointly by Schumann, Brahms, and Dietrich in October 1853. Schumann now proceeded to expand his own two-movement contribution by adding a further two movements. It is difficult not to be struck by the uncensored juxtaposition of heterogeneous elements. The earlier period is recalled by the high-flown tone and cascading scales that seem to have been written with Clara in mind. At the same time there is a tendency to impose a sense of unity on the motific material by means of the F–A–E motif and a second three-note “nuclear” motif.20 In the final movement in particular the sheer persistence of the motific writing is hard to beat. Finally there are mannerisms such as those that take the form of traditional violinistic figures like the ones that Schumann had used when arranging Bach’s sonatas for unaccompanied violin and in his more recent adaptation of Paganini’s Caprices. Most striking of all are the interruptions to the narrative flow. All in all, it is a magnificent piece of chamber music as long as the listener does not expect stylistic purity or hard-won climaxes but is willing to countenance the idea of individual tirades.

  Qualities that may work in the intimate context of a chamber sonata may not be as effective in a rather more public arena. We should not accuse Clara, Joachim, and Brahms of inconsistency for adopting a positive attitude to the Violin Concerto that Schumann worked on at almost the same time as the final movements of the F–A–E Sonata, while locking it away after his death. There is, after all, a difference between studying a work in close contact with its creator and in full knowledge of his aims and fretting over the question of how an audience avid for sensation might react to such a composition. Would they discover early signs of Schumann’s impending breakdown in the piece?

  Some eighty-four years were to pass before posterity had a chance to judge for itself. Yehudi Menuhin was asked by the publishing house of Schott to give the work’s posthumous first performance in New York and wrote enthusiastically to the conductor Vladimir Golschmann on July 22, 1937:

  This concerto is the missing link of the violin literature; it is the bridge between the Beethoven and the Brahms concertos, though leaning more towards Brahms. Indeed, one finds in both the same human warmth, caressing softness, bold manly rhythms, the same lovely arabesque treatment of the violin, the same rich and noble themes and harmonies.21

  Although one cannot help but wonder why Menuhin does not mention Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto—a work of which he was immensely fond—as the “missing link” between Beethoven and Brahms, there is no doubt from his comments that he felt that Schumann’s concerto was worth an airing. In fact, it was not Menuhin who gave the work its first performance, but the German violinist Georg Kulenkampff, who performed the piece in the Deutsche Oper in Berlin on November 26, 1937, under the baton of Karl Böhm. Menuhin had to wait until ten days later, when he performed the piece with piano accompaniment in New York’s Carnegie Hall. Kulenkampff, it should be added, played the solo part from a version prepared by Paul Hindemith, whose contribution remained anonymous after he had been ostracized by the National Socialists. Menuhin himself had been banned from giving the work’s first performance after the National Socialists’ cultural bureaucrats discovered that Schott had acquired the publishing rights to the work, the autograph score of which was preserved in the State Library in Berlin. Instead, they demanded it back for the nation: as a Jew, Menuhin was not to be allowed to perform it. The work was especially welcome to the National Socialists as a substitute for the now proscribed Violin Concerto by the Jewish Mendelssohn. At a conference organized jointly by the Reich Culture Chamber and the Nazi association Strength Through Joy, the influential critic Walter Abendroth presumed to declare that although the concerto’s “fragmentary, sketch-like design” meant that it was hardly “a revelation of sensational significance,” it was nonetheless “German through and through.”22 More recently, Gidon Kremer has observed that its “naked ideas or naked impulses are so brilliant that they are sometimes more powerful than the most carefully composed piece of music by Brahms.”23

  It is, of course, impossible to pass objective aesthetic judgment on works that attest to a high degree of compositional reflection while at the same time refusing to conform to any traditional model. Reinhard Kapp has analyzed the first forty-four bars of the concerto—in other words, its orchestral introduction alone—in the course of a charitable assessment that extends to twenty-three closely printed pages, arguing that this detail may be interpreted one way, that detail another way.24 This makes sense. And it is undoubtedly impressive. But the work will never be a crowd-pleaser. And it is f
ar too resistant to attempts to judge it by traditional generic criteria. One would like to listen to the work in as open-minded a way as possible, but, as Laura Tunbridge has noted: “With the Violin Concerto we are so aware of the work’s reception history that we cannot but listen to it as a late work.”25

  There remain the Songs of Dawn op. 133, a set of five relatively short piano pieces. These are the last piano works whose publication Schumann himself superintended from his asylum at Endenich. As such, the work is surrounded by a very particular aura, not least because for a long time Schumann considered calling it “Diotima: Songs of Dawn.” He was no doubt thinking of Hölderlin’s figure of Diotima and was equally certainly affected not only by the character herself but also by the fate of her creator: we have already referred to the “feelings of awe” with which he spoke about Hölderlin, who from 1806 to 1843 lived in a tower in Tübingen, plagued by mental illness.

  Schumann’s project book for the period between 1849 and 1851 already mentions plans for the Songs of Dawn. But there is something strangely touching about the way in which work on a project with such an optimistic subject as dawn could be slipped into his schedule—reconstructed from his housekeeping book for the autumn of 1853—between his daily concerns and the (undisclosed) fiasco surrounding the performance of Moritz Hauptmann’s Mass in St. Maximilian’s Church:

  15 [October]: Sat for a second time for [the French painter Jean-Joseph-Bonaventure] Laurens. Very attractive picture. Idea for a sonata for Joachim [F–A–E Sonata]. Diotima.