Robert Schumann: The Life and Work of a Romantic Composer

by Martin Geck

  In much the same way, the final movement of Papillons may be interpreted in a figurative sense. Here the elegant theme is overwhelmed by the stolid Grandfathers’ Dance that traditionally ended weddings and similar festivities; and the final diminuendo includes the sound of a clock striking six in the morning—the ghosts have fled. Then, right at the end, we hear an effect familiar from the Abegg Variations as the pianist plays a seven-note chord before gradually releasing each note in turn to leave only a solitary A. Even during a much earlier period, there had been pieces of music that had died away in a meaningful manner, but most composers had adopted a more naïve approach to this device than the young Schumann: the note A that remains at the end is all that remains of the Papillons theme, which in the course of this final movement is quite literally deconstructed—that, at least, is how a post-modernist writer would express it, albeit without being able to express the fact that this act of deconstruction is so carefully constructed that construction and deconstruction, even if they do not cancel each other out, are at any rate held in a state of precarious balance.

  We may, of course, choose to see a connection between this quest for balance in the young Schumann’s works in general and his own psychological makeup, and yet this would be of little consequence if he had not succeeded in reworking this quintessential Schumannesque theme in such a way that listeners can identify with a personal characteristic that has become a musical theme. True, this ability to identify with Schumann and his music will initially apply only to those listeners who have a schizophrenic attitude to their own age and who suffer as a result. Here the idea of the freely acting ego gains momentum in the wake of the Sturm und Drang movement and German idealism, while this same ego simultaneously sees itself hoppled and gagged by the juste milieu. The fact that there is invariably a political dimension to all of this is clear from works such as the Faschingsschwank aus Wien (literally, “Carnival Prank from Vienna,” but more usually translated as “Carnival Scenes from Vienna”) op. 26.

  Schumann concealed two quotations in this last-named work: the Grandfathers’ Dance familiar from Papillons and the Marseillaise. And yet both quotations are almost unrecognizable, again allowing us to speak of deconstruction. And there is no doubt that this deconstruction is intentional. The Grandfathers’ Dance represents a tradition that had outlived its own usefulness, while the Marseillaise implies a new beginning, albeit one that the inhabitants of Vienna were unable to acknowledge openly, for in the Habsburg monarchy the Marseillaise was regarded as a token of rebellion—visitors were advised not even to whistle it if they wanted to avoid a run-in with the police. Schumann, who had spent much of the spring of 1839 working on his op. 26 in Vienna, was undoubtedly aware of this background—there were good reasons he was repeatedly warned by well-meaning insiders to be on his guard against censorship.

  It would be wrong to place too much emphasis on the fact that he still insisted on playing with fire, even if only a little, but nor should we ignore it completely, for if nothing else it indicates the extent to which Schumann was able to hold up his “states of mind” for public inspection. Even within himself, he seems to be saying, both the outdated old and the yet-to-be-experienced new cohabited in a precarious relationship. He was not interested in mocking the one and idealizing the other but in examining an entirely realistic element in our engagement with the world: we have already quoted from his letter to Clara Wieck in which he had explained that “because everything remarkable that happens in this age moves me, I then have to express it in my music.” And a work like Faschingsschwank aus Wien makes it clear that this must be understood in an entirely concrete way.

  Schumann’s Carnaval op. 9 was published in 1837 and amounts to a public declaration of the extent to which the theme of masks that had always fascinated him was currently the focus of his interest, not least in the headings that he gave to several of its movements: “Pierrot,” “Harlequin,” and “Pantaloon and Columbine.” Between nos. 8 and 9, the notes E-flat–C–B–A, A-flat–C–B, and A–E-flat–C–B are notated beneath the heading “Sphinxes.” These notes are not intended to be played and certainly do not constitute a piece of music in their own right but provide a code that can be deciphered as soon as they are linked to the work’s subtitle: Scènes mignonnes sur quatre notes (Charming scenes on four notes). These are the four notes that are spelled out under “Sphinxes” and provide the music with its basic motific material, like a poetic ribbon that winds itself round the colorful sequence of scenes featuring not only commedia dell’arte characters but also two of Schumann’s colleagues, “Chopin” and “Paganini,” as well as figures from the world of the League of David, “Florestan,” “Eusebius,” “Chiarina,” and so on.

  This gave Schumann a chance to show off his “dual nature”: an expressive Adagio characterizes the meek and dreamy Eusebius, although it is clear from the complex quintuplets and septuplets that accompany him that there is nothing phlegmatic about him, while a wild outburst headed “Passionato” and beginning with the notes A–E-flat–C–B sums up the sanguine Florestan, who is bursting with the urge to act. Elsewhere Schumann explains how we should imagine such an idealist: “What is the point of dressing a roving youth in a grandfather’s fur dressing gown and sticking a long pipe in his mouth in the hope that he will become more settled and better behaved? Leave him his long hair and loose-fitting clothes!—Florestan.”23

  Performers and listeners still do not know what A–E-flat–C–B means. (In German notation these notes are A–Es–C–H.) Are we supposed to guess that there was not only a B–A–C–H (in English notation, B-flat–A–C–B) but also a S(= Es)–C–H–[UM]–A–[NN] (in English notation, E-flat–C–B–[UM]–A–[NN])? But even then we would still not know that we are also dealing with A–S(= Es)–C–H and hence with the Bohemian home of Ernestine von Fricken, to whom Schumann was briefly engaged to be married. Schumann himself belatedly offered a vague and somewhat cryptic explanation of the letters when he reviewed Carnaval in his Neue Zeitschrift in 1840, glossing them as “the name of a little town where a musical acquaintance of mine lived,” and as “mere letters of the scale that also happened to be a part of my own name.” It was, he concluded, “one of those games that since Bach’s time are no longer new.”24

  Nothing more is needed. At the risk of leaving much that is unexplained and not even properly examined, the air of mystery surrounding the work may not be destroyed. If the “states of mind” that the piece reflect are dragged out into daylight, then the spell will be lost, and musical poetry will be turned into nothing more than banal and petty craftsmanship. Encodings of this kind serve not least to protect the artist, a goal that they achieve in what is almost a psychopathological context:

  It is a good thing that mankind feels a certain timidity in the face of the workplace of genius: we do not want to know about the causes, tools, and mysteries of the creative process, just as nature herself proclaims a certain delicacy by covering her roots in the ground. [. . .] We would discover terrible things if we could get to the bottom of the origins of every work.25

  These sentences are taken from Schumann’s review of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique. Here he was at pains to point out that in his eyes not even the most impassioned work is an autobiographical document. While making no secret of the work’s private context, such an approach leads us away from that context in order to deal with “states of mind” that any member of the League of David can grasp without further ado. If the ninth of the Davidsbündlertänze op. 6 begins in the first printed edition not with music but with the note, “At this point Florestan finished what he was saying, and his lips twitched painfully,” this reflects the state of mind of Florestan as a member of the League of David, not that of Schumann himself. Is it possible, however, to separate the two? Which of them wrote to Clara, asking her to “Play them [the Davidsbündlertänze] occasionally at nine in the evening!”?26

  It is no accident that the masquerades associated with the Shrovetide car
nival provided the young Schumann with themes that he found particularly appealing, leading not only to the composition of Papillons, Carnaval, and Faschingsschwank aus Wien but also inspiring him to write “Florestan’s Shrovetide Oration” following a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, an article that we have already examined, just as we have already noted the “whole carnival” which, according to Schumann, found expression in Schubert’s German Dances.

  Carnaval was never intended to surpass these German Dances. Nor, indeed, could it do so. Its aim, rather, was to continue their tradition in a neo-romantic vein. In the final line of his poem “To a Lamp,” Schubert’s contemporary Eduard Mörike had written of the “genuine artistic creation” that “what is beautiful seems blissful within itself.” It was a sentiment shared by Schubert. But the emphasis is on the word “seems”: not only to our own ears but presumably to Schumann’s as well, Schubert’s German Dances can be no more than a dim reflection of the naïve beauty of old. Whereas Schubert completes the step from the naïve to the sentimental, the young Schumann takes the process a stage further by graduating from the sentimental to the reflective; and in the extreme case, criticism transcends beauty.

  Even in the case of Papillons, Schumann wote, “This self-destruction of Papillons may have something critical about it, certainly there is nothing artistic here. A glass of champagne may be inserted between the individual movements.” Otherwise, “the changes are too rapid, the colors too garish.”27 In a letter that he addressed to Clara Wieck from Vienna, Schumann indicated that this was arguably even more true of Carnaval:

  You often perform Carnaval for people who as yet know nothing else by me—wouldn’t the Phantasiestücke be better from this point of view? In Carnaval each piece cancels out the next, something that not all listeners can tolerate, whereas they are bound to feel more comfortable with the Phantasiestücke.28

  Certainly, the “thread” that is provided by the notes A–E-flat–C–B and that is intended to hold the piece together is rarely clear to the listener, with the result that the procession of masked figures, which is further obscured by such intermediary stages as “Réplique,” “Reconnaissance,” “Valse allemande,” “Aveu,” “Promenade,” and “Pause,” creates a far more bizarre impression than a succession of Schubert dances, dances which are far more likely to “seem blissful within themselves.” Whereas the last-named pieces refer to nothing but the dance type that they depict, Schumann’s music evokes far-reaching associations not least through the confusing variety of the titles given to the individual movements. There are also allusions of a compositional kind inasmuch as Schumann quotes musical gestures familiar from Chopin and Paganini, while also harking back explicitly to Papillons with the mischievous comment: “(Papillon?).” The music also refers expressly to the Grandfathers’ Dance: “Thème du XVIIème siècle” (Theme from the seventeenth century). And in the final movement, which is headed “Marche des ‘Davidsbündler’ contre les Philistins,” there is a brief echo of the main subject of the final movement of Beethoven’s “heroic” Fifth Piano Concerto (bars eleven and twelve in the right hand of the piano part): here Beethoven is invoked as a confederate.

  This “march” makes it clear to performers and listeners alike that Schumann’s headings are no substitute for their own reflections on the work. Where else can we find a march in waltz time? And how is it possible to distinguish between the musical gestures that are intended to place an ironic gloss on the philistines’ muscle-bound antics and those that represent a good-humored satire on the power fantasies of the members of the League of David? Schumann writes as if his adversaries are pulling together on the same rope, allowing him to clarify his own aesthetic position: music is not intended to paint a picture, and headings do not represent a program in the strict sense of the term. When Ludwig Rellstab wrote dismissively about the programmatic element in the Kinderscenen op. 15, Schumann retorted angrily, “I expect he thinks that I place a screaming child in front of me and pick out the notes to go with it. The opposite is the case. And yet I do not deny that I had a few children in mind when I wrote these pieces; on the other hand, the headings came later, of course, and are really no more than relatively subtle pointers to the execution and interpretation of these works.”29

  This brings us to the multisectional cycle in which the young Schumann was particularly concerned with obvious meaning and was able to justify this with aesthetic arguments: childhood is innocent—at least against the background of the miniature scenes which according to Schumann himself “depict reflections of an older person and for older people.”30 A tone that he himself described as “blissful”31 and that he had occasionally struck in the Fantasiestücke op. 12 is perpetuated here. In a letter to Clara, Schumann wrote of the “old and eternal conditions and moods that rule us”; he would demonstrate to her “at the piano by means of some of the Kinderscenen” that “the intimate, the simply lovely, and the unaffected” could also be “romantic.”32

  It did not have to be the “infatuated howling”33 that Schumann found so unbearable in the music of Carl Banck, who was one of Clara’s admirers. But these “funny little things” had to be played “lightly & delicately & as joyful as our future.”34 And perhaps in German? In any event, Clara wrote to Schumann from Paris in March 1839, referring to the title “By the Hearth”: “The hearth is German, [. . .] this coziness cannot be found by any French hearth.”35

  This is not simply a spur-of-the-moment remark, nor even an attempt on the part of the young pianist to define her position in the hurly-burly of an international metropolis, which she was visiting without her father to watch over her. Rather, the background is the musico-aesthetic discourse that was central to Schumann’s thinking and familiar, of course, to Clara. In 1837, for example, he had written a favorable review of Stephen Heller’s Impromptus op. 7 that had included the following profession of faith:

  I am heartily sick of the word “romantic,” even though I have not spoken it ten times in my entire life; and yet—if I wanted to give our young seer a title—that is what I would call him, and how! Thank God our composer knows nothing of that vague, nihilistic sense of disorder behind which many people seek romanticism, nor does he know about the crude, materialist daubings so beloved of the French neoromantics; on the contrary, he generally feels things naturally and expresses himself astutely and clearly.36

  Schumann presumably took over the terms “nihilism” and “materialism” from Jean Paul’s Preliminary School of Aesthetics—he felt that at least in part Liszt’s piano music was nihilistic, Meyerbeer’s operas materialistic. In Papillons and Carnaval he may have come within an inch of the frontier with nihilism, but there is no doubt that he exorcised this danger with his Kinderscenen, which he regarded, rather, as “German.” In doing so, Schumann gave the lie to all who would like to pin him down to a particular compositional creed that saw itself above all as a form of criticism—criticism of the shallowness and intellectual laziness of the juste milieu and of the hankering after empty effects of its favorite performers. Such features may help to characterize the piano works of the young Schumann, but they certainly do not dominate these pieces to the exclusion of all else.

  It is tempting to believe that Schumann had a number of children in mind when he wrote his Kinderscenen, especially when we recall how thoughtful he could be toward children. In April 1838, in a letter that he addressed to Clara, who was at that date in Vienna, basking in her newfound glory as chamber virtuosa to the imperial and royal court, he writes:

  A little boy who lives in one of the other apartments in this building was here a moment ago—he and his friends sometimes call on me—and he said that he too could write; he then drew some big things and asked me if I could tell him what he’d written. Isn’t that sweet? The boy thinks that the letters were there before the thoughts. I had to laugh.37

  But it is equally tempting to believe Schumann when he writes that it was only after the event that he thought up titles such as “O
f Foreign Lands and Peoples,” “A Curious Story,” “Blind Man’s Bluff,” “Pleading Child,” “Happy Enough,” “An Important Event,” “Dreaming,” “At the Fireside,” “Knight of the Hobbyhorse,” and so on. More generally, he had the following to say on this subject:

  Now and again people have criticized these headings for works of music and claimed that good music does not need such pointers. Of course, it doesn’t: but nor does it lose any of its value as a result, and it is the safest way that the composer has of pre-empting any obvious misconception of the work’s character. If poets try to encapsulate the meaning of a whole poem in a heading, why should musicians not do the same?38

  Schumann’s titles tell us what he himself had in mind when he was playing or listening to the piece in question and in that way they provide us with an example of imaginative listening. This idea is particularly important in the case of the Kinderscenen, because without the narrative concept stated in the title we would undoubtedly regard these pieces as a less coherent collection and derive less enjoyment from them. It makes no difference whether the individual headings reflect the contents of the movements as precisely as they do in numbers such as “Blind Man’s Bluff” and “Child before Falling Asleep” or whether they offer only a vague indication as in the case of “Dreaming” and “Of Foreign Lands and Peoples,” the opening movement whose title is justified only to the extent that it deals with matters of interest. The exact nature of these matters of interest remains open.

  The fact that “Dreaming” was to become arguably Schumann’s most popular piece is due not only to its title, of course, even though that heading is the first point of contact between the composer on the one hand and performers and listeners on the other. “What is it called?” a person asks on his first encounter with a child. “It’s called ‘Dreaming,’” Schumann replies. “Hello, ‘Dreaming,’” players and listeners respond.