by Martin Geck
16 [October]: [. . .] Diotima.—5 o’clock music. Laurens for the last time.—Gift of manuscripts to him & Brahms.
17 [October]: Busy.—Failed attempt at spirit-rapping.
18 [October]: Completed “Songs of Dawn.”—Rhenish Antiquarian.26
(The last two words of this entry relate to the first two volumes of a major publication that was then in the process of appearing. According to its title page, it contained “the most important and most agreeable geographic, historical, and political curiosities along the whole of the River Rhine.”)
A few days before he threw himself into the Rhine, Schumann wrote to the publisher Friedrich Wilhelm Arnold, describing the Songs of Dawn as “pieces depicting the emotions on the approach & waxing of morning, but more an expression of feeling than painting.”27 This explanation clearly recalls Beethoven’s famous comment on his Pastoral Symphony (“more an expression of feeling than painting”). Nor was it chosen at random. For even more clearly than the piano works from Schumann’s earlier years, the Songs of Dawn eschew programmatic and poetically associative elements, preferring instead to explore characteristic differences in terms of their form and design, so much so, indeed, that we may be inclined to echo Michael Struck and speak of different types of “instrumental song”: “chorale,” “duet,” “song with instrumental accompaniment,” and “hunting song with horn writing.”28 Listeners would have to decide for themselves whether to relate Schumann’s ideas on the subject of dawn to Hölderlin’s poem “To Diotima,” to the same writer’s fragmentary novel Hyperion, to the more general idea of newly awakening life, or to the specific image of a new dawn in nature. Schumann himself may have remembered that he had already set the words “When, O when will morning come, when, O when?” in his Spanisches Liederspiel op. 74, where the setting, however powerful, appears under the title “Melancholia.”
Intermezzo IX
A “Sugary Saxon”?
Born in 1788, Lord Byron was a legend in his own lifetime, albeit less so in his native England, which sought, rather, to outlaw him on account of what was regarded as his scandalous lifestyle, than in Continental Europe, where he became a leading figure in the world not only of poetry but also of politics as a result of his passionate support for the Greek War of Independence. Goethe raised a monument to him in the figure of Euphorion in the second part of Faust. Byron, who died of cholera in the Greek town of Missolonghi at the age of only thirty-six, was regarded by European intellectuals as the embodiment of youth and of a generation that refused to accept that the ideals of the French Revolution had been compromised and ultimately destroyed first by political atrocities and then by the violent restoration of the ancien régime.
In German-speaking countries, Byronism found its most powerful echo within the literary movement known as “Young Germany,” whose supporters regarded the poet as the expression of a modern view of the world: convinced that their own fates were exceptional, they sought to lead lives that were a mixture of grandiosity, world weariness, lovesick repining, disgust with life, and an entanglement with black magic. Nowadays we might be inclined to dismiss all of this as a sign of protracted puberty, but Byron was able to articulate it in poems that swept younger readers off their feet and left few composers untouched. Of the countless Byron settings, three have remained in the repertory: Berlioz’s four-part Harold en Italie, Tchaikovsky’s Manfred Symphony, and Schumann’s Manfred op. 115.
In the course of his life Schumann took many literary figures to heart: E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Kapellmeister Kreisler in his Kreisleriana; Vult, Walt, and Wina from Jean Paul’s Flegeljahre in Papillons; Goethe’s Mignon in his Wilhelm Meister Songs op. 98a and in his Requiem for Mignon op. 98b; and Faust in his Scenes from Goethe’s Faust. But none of these characters includes as many Schumannesque elements as Byron’s Manfred: a dark sense of guilt that weighs down on the hero; a lifelong fascination with his one and only love, Astarte; a striving for the grandiose; loneliness and existential anxieties; a search for hidden knowledge involving the use of magic; and, finally, the attempt to end his own life. Although these elements cannot be applied without further ado to Schumann himself, the more somber aspects of his character do appear to be reflected here as if in a mirror, albeit invested with a sublime and grandiose dimension. Even the loneliness of the high mountains in which the action of Manfred is set—like the world of the gods in Wagner’s Ring—gives the work an air of tragic grandeur that one also senses in John Martin’s watercolor Manfred on the Jungfrau (reproduced on p.243).
The young Schumann was able to read some of Byron’s poems in a German translation in his father’s library. An entry in his student diary for March 26, 1829, reads: “Agitated state of mind—bedtime reading: Byron’s Manfred—terrible night.” Three days later another entry runs: “Childe Harold in bed—terrible night disturbed by dreams about death.”1 A number of the impressions that Schumann wrote down during his tour of the Alps that year also echo Byronic phrases.
It was not until 1848 that Schumann felt bold enough to tackle a project based on Byron’s Manfred. Evidently it needed the impetus of the revolution for him to approach a poem that struck him and many of his contemporaries as the embodiment of grandeur. In August 1848, immediately after he had completed Genoveva, he was seized by what he himself described as a very real “enthusiasm for Manfred.”2 His grandson Ferdinand recalled that “My grandmother Clara told me in 1895 that my grandfather read to her from Byron’s Manfred while they were sitting in a field one evening, and by the end she was in tears.”3 When he subsequently read to his wife from the poem in Düsseldorf, “his voice suddenly broke off, tears poured down his face, and such emotion seized hold of him that he was unable to go on reading.”4
Schumann wrote the overture, followed by fifteen other numbers, during the second half of 1848, his aim being to turn Byron’s “theater of the mind” into a theatrical event that would raise the subject of Manfred in public awareness. The purely instrumental numbers tend in the main to underscore the dialogue spoken by Manfred and the other participants in the drama, and to that extent Schumann’s setting is a melodrama. But there are also songs and choruses for the spirits and “monastic chanting” that is heard in the distance.
Schumann described the work, which lasts some eighty minutes in performance, as a “Dramatic Poem in Three Parts with Music.” He had to wait almost four years for a performance, which he ultimately owed to the commitment of Franz Liszt, who conducted the world premiere in a fully staged version at the Weimar Court Theater on June 13, 1852. The work was frequently performed thereafter—in 1855, Brahms organized a concert performance in Hamburg, and Munich audiences heard the piece in 1868 when Ernst Possart took the leading role in what was to prove an important step on his career as a famous actor and, later, a theater director.
John Martin, Manfred on the Jungfrau, 1837. (© Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery. Photograph courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library.)
Staged during the reign of King Ludwig II, this successful production in Munich coincided with Wagner’s heyday in the Bavarian capital, indicating that Schumann’s music was not felt to be in the least provincial but was regarded as an example of a substantial kind of art that traded in ideas. It undoubtedly went down just as well with a cultured audience as Liszt’s Mazeppa and Tasso, two symphonic poems likewise inspired by Byron.
But how are we to interpret Schumann’s remark to the effect that “I have never abandoned myself to a composition with the love and expenditure of effort that I did in the case of Manfred”?5 After all, this is a work that privileges the spoken word, obliging him as a composer to play second fiddle. Of course, there are classic precedents, such as Beethoven’s incidental music to Egmont, but whereas the music to Egmont serves no more than an ancillary function during performances of Goethe’s tragedy, Schumann envisaged a total artwork featuring highly heterogeneous musical elements which, admittedly, were fully attuned to the spoken word and onstage action but which could never be
judged by the aesthetic standards of “absolute” music.
The answer to our question takes two forms. First, Schumann’s identification with his subject was so extreme in the present case that there was a significant difference between his own approach and Beethoven’s; second, his music serves far more than a mere ancillary purpose, for ultimately the music alone can bring to light all that lies hidden in the poem. On its own, it has little value, of course, which is why Schumann was so annoyed with his publisher when the latter brought out a vocal score of Manfred in which the poem was reproduced at the beginning rather than being set between the individual numbers: “The music will remain a puzzle to anyone unfamiliar with its connection with the poem.”6 Schumann was concerned less with his own work as such than with the bigger picture, and there is no doubt that he could enlist his contemporaries’ support in this regard, for they too viewed art as a holistic experience and were presumably not unhappy with programs in which symphonies and arias were not simply juxtaposed but language and music helped to enhance one another.
Today’s listeners appear to find Byron’s overwrought poetry almost unbearable, but they still have the overture: an opening bar of Beethoven, 11 closing bars of Mendelssohn, but between them 296 bars of uniquely distinctive Schumann. It matters little whether Manfred is generally closer to the aesthetic of the New German school, for which Schumann really had little time for all that he was closer to it than he realized. No, what matters is that no other composer can hold a candle to this overture: not Beethoven, not Mendelssohn, not Liszt, not Wagner. For which other composer could present such a credible portrait of a character like Manfred in the constant vicissitudes of his passions and in his inner conflict between heroic bombast, his desire for love, and a sense of profound depression, churned up, as he is, by the somberly sublime signals issuing from Ariman’s realm of the dead? Who could turn all of this into a work that makes sense on its own terms and needs no program for the listener to understand it?
All of his hero’s “rare states of mind” that are so convincingly depicted here by Schumann are reflected in the musical structure in which the drama of the unfolding events is mirrored. The way in which the motifs are torn apart, expanded, and woven together again is an accurate reflection of Manfred’s complex state of mind, and the same is true of the disjointed nature of the musical argument, of the passage in bars 104–109 that suggests a state of total disorientation, and of the fact that it is not until the end of the overture, in bars 258–73, that we hear a self-contained sixteen-bar period that might express any sense of reassurance. All of this may be interpreted as an expression of Manfred’s inner landscape, while retaining its status as “absolute” music and, as such, eliciting Brahms’s unconditional admiration. Although Brahms once whimsically remarked that all he had ever learned from Schumann was how to play chess, he was so fascinated by Manfred in general that when he came to write the opening movement of his First Symphony he included a clear echo of the motif associated not only with Astarte’s love but also—in Brahms’s mind—with Clara:
Schumann’s Manfred Overture, op. 115 (1848–49).
The second subject in the opening movement of Brahms’s First Symphony in C Minor op. 68 (1862–76).
Schumann himself reintroduces this motif in his final scene as the echo of a “requiem” sung by a “choir in the distant monastery” as Manfred lies dying. Byron’s hero dies without the consolation of the Christian faith, “cold—cold—even to the heart,” whereas Schumann adopts a more conciliatory ending: the “Requiem aeternam dona eis” (give them eternal rest) is heard in the form of a double canon, conveying the idea of calm expectation and implying that Manfred, too, may find peace in death. The final lines of the monks’ chanting incorporate the motif associated with Astarte’s love, and in doing so they also recall the appearance of a motif traditionally described as “redemption through love” in the final bars of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the gods). Where words would be spoken in vain, music may offer us a glimmer of hope.
Unlike Wagner, however, Schumann has to answer to a librettist—in this case Byron, who would have had no time whatsoever for a conciliatory ending. It comes as no surprise, therefore, to discover that one of Byron’s admirers, Friedrich Nietzsche, who was familiar with large sections of Schumann’s music and even worked through them at the piano, had harsh words to say about Manfred in Ecce homo:
I must be profoundly related to Byron’s Manfred: I discovered all these abysses in myself—I was ripe for this work at thirteen. [. . . But] the Germans are incapable of any conception of greatness: proof Schumann. Expressly from wrath against this sugary Saxon, I composed a counter-overture to Manfred, of which Hans von Bülow said he had never seen the like on manuscript paper: it constituted a rape on Euterpe.7
Although Nietzsche’s implied reproach that Christianity has no scope for genuine tragedy is certainly worth noting, his reference to his own Manfred overture suggests nothing so much as a satyr play following on from a tragedy. Here the philosopher, who lacked any sense of musical form, for all that his compositions are of a decent amateur quality, is guilty of a certain grotesqueness. Admittedly, he was sufficiently self-critical to describe his own Manfred Meditation of 1872 as a “piece for four hands expressive of the darkest pathos and made up of nothing but incantatory phrases.”8 And in a second letter to his friend Gustav Krug, he explained that he would find it “harmful to lie on my stomach in such a musically melancholy manner like a bear on its bear skin” and to be preoccupied with such “crass matters and with such awkward fortissimos and tremolandos.”9
But Nietzsche should have known better than to remain attached to his Manfred Meditation. Expectantly he wrote to Bülow, begging him to pass judgment on the piece, and when Bülow’s verdict turned out to be annihilating, he turned to a higher authority: Bayreuth. Not a year had passed since the Wagners, at that date still at Tribschen on Lake Lucerne, had had fun at the expense of the philosopher’s Echo of New Year’s Eve, which was a kind of preliminary draft for his Manfred Meditation. True, they kept their feelings to themselves and said nothing to Nietzsche, a frequent and welcome visitor to whom they were grateful for the Wagnerian Birth of Tragedy. But following her husband’s break with Nietzsche, Cosima Wagner was pleased to confide in her diary the extent to which the couple had had to suppress their laughter in 1872. Hans Richter, who was present on this occasion, recalled Wagner’s mocking, if not entirely uncharitable, remark: “You spend eighteen months in regular contact with a person without suspecting anything like this; and now he comes along, insidiously hiding a score in his clothes.”10
Nietzsche asked Wagner to back him in his argument with Bülow, prompting Wagner to explain in as friendly a way as he could that on a recent visit his father-in-law Liszt had found Bülow’s condemnation “fairly extreme,”11 making Nietzsche think that Liszt had “expressed an entirely favorable opinion” about the piece, as he claimed in a letter to his sister.12 As a result, he continued with his determined attempt to enlist the support of others for his Manfred Meditation.
It is perhaps worth ending this intermezzo by recalling the title of the chapter in Ecce homo in which Nietzsche, a writer whose views on music were actually extremely astute, poured out his contempt for Schumann’s Manfred: it is headed “Why I Am So Clever.”
A colored drawing of Schumann by the French artist Jean-Joseph-Bonaventure Laurens, now in the Heinrich Heine Institute in Düsseldorf. Schumann was in regular contact with the painter, who was a great admirer of his music. When Schumann sat for him three times in his apartment in October 1853, Laurens was struck by the “abnormal dilation” of Schumann’s pupils, whereupon Clara—in a state of “great concern”—confided that her husband was “ill” (Briefe. Neue Folge 530). Laurens produced a total of four drawings of Schumann. None of them enjoys a particularly high reputation among writers on the composer, even though Clara described one of them as “wonderfully fine” (Litzmann 2:283). Schumann’s own entry i
n his housekeeping book for October 15, 1853, reads, “Sat for Laurens for a second time. Very attractive portrait” (Tagebücher 3/2:639). (Photograph courtesy of the Heinrich Heine Institut, Düsseldorf.)
CHAPTER 12
Endenich (1854–56)
Your paper’s cultural journalism—the more of it there is, the worse it gets. As soon as one enters into the ideological simplifications and biographical reductivism of cultural journalism, the essence of the artifact is lost. Your cultural journalism is tabloid gossip disguised as an interest in “the arts,” and everything that it touches is contracted into what it is not. Who is the celebrity, what is the price, what is the scandal? What transgression has the writer committed, and not against the exigencies of literary aesthetics but against his or her daughter, son, mother, father, spouse, lover, friend, publisher, or pet?
Philip Roth, Exit Ghost1
The foregoing philippic is taken from a fictional letter written to the New York Times by one of the characters in a Philip Roth novel. By the same token, any Schumann biographer would surely have to reproach himself for approaching the final years of his subject’s life with a cold or even malicious glint in his eye, an approach for which there are—unhappily—many precedents. Whereas Nancy B. Reich, in her 1990 article “Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms,” maintains a decorous distance from all idle speculation,2 Eva Weissweiler, whose three-volume edition of the correspondence between Schumann and his wife would otherwise entitle her to be regarded as a serious Schumann scholar, adopted a positively libelous tone that very same year when describing the couple’s final years of marriage. Evidently fired by her love of sensationalism and flying in the face of all the historical evidence, she claimed that Clara was unwilling to visit her husband at the asylum in Endenich in order not to spoil the “happiness” inspired by her “love” for Brahms.3 The fact that in this context she peddles the old wives’ tale about the couple’s eldest son Felix, claiming that his father was in fact Brahms and that in her diary, in order to divert attention from this, Clara deliberately gave the wrong date for the discovery of her pregnancy4 represents an act of particularly brazen effrontery, for by the time that her biography of Clara had appeared in print, the couple’s housekeeping books had been available for eight years, making it clear beyond peradventure that Schumann discovered that his wife was pregnant on October 3, 1853, and that he had sex with her that very same day. Brahms did not arrive in Düsseldorf until four days later.
