Robert Schumann: The Life and Work of a Romantic Composer

by Martin Geck

  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.

  Schumann to his sister-in-law Therese Schumann, New Year’s Eve 18361

  The present chapter is concerned in the main with Schumann’s relations with Clara Wieck—the phrase “probationary years” refers above all to the time when he was engaged to be married to a woman whom we have already met as his “muse.” First, however, we need to say something about her predecessor, Ernestine von Fricken, who first appeared in Leipzig in the spring of 1834. “My friend Ernestine von Fricken arrived on April 21 in order to study the piano with my father,” Clara noted in her diary.2 Three years older than Clara, Ernestine was the adopted daughter of a landowner from Asch in Bohemia. She boarded with the Wiecks, and when Wieck sent his daughter to Dresden for a longer period of study, Ernestine and Schumann found themselves drawn into each other’s company. In the end, they became secretly engaged.

  The fourteen-year-old Clara, who had just been confirmed, observed these developments both from close quarters and from afar and felt a growing sense of jealousy. Wieck, we know, would have welcomed any union between Robert and Ernestine, as his daughter would then be out of danger. He wrote to Baron von Fricken, describing Schumann as “somewhat whimsical and obstinate, but a generous, splendid, effusive, highly gifted, and intellectually profoundly well educated individual—in short, a musician and a writer of genius.”3 Ernestine returned to her native Asch in September 1834 without having learned very much from Wieck, prompting Clara to dip her pen in venom:

  She was like a plant which as long as it is watered and remains where it is can be maintained with a great deal of effort and trouble, but as soon as it is moved, it withers and gradually dies as it no longer has the accustomed care and rest. The sun shone down too strongly on it—the sun in this case being Herr Schumann.4

  In his biography of Clara Schumann, Berthold Litzmann claimed that it was her father who entered these sentences in her diary, but it is clear from the original, now in the Robert Schumann Museum in Zwickau, that they are in Clara’s own handwriting. Even so, Litzmann is not entirely wrong, for Wieck initially kept the diary for his daughter and for a long time afterward continued to supervise all that she wrote in it, so that it is entirely possible that he more or less dictated this particular entry.

  Four years later, Schumann himself explained the situation to Clara, who by now had replaced Ernestine as his fiancée:

  At that time I was forever running to my doctor in a terrible state of agitation and telling him everything—I kept fainting, I was so afraid that I simply did not know which way to turn, nay, I could not even vouch for the fact that I would not take my own life, so utterly helpless was the state in which I found myself. Don’t be alarmed, my angel from Heaven, but simply listen to what I have to say. The doctor was kind enough to console me & finally said with a smile: “Medicine won’t help; find a woman, she’ll cure you at once.” Things became easier for me; I thought it was working; you were not really very worried about me & were yourself at a crossroads, no longer a child but not yet a young woman. And then Ernestine came along—a young woman as good as any that the world has ever produced—it’s her, I thought: she’ll save you. I wanted to cling to a feminine being with every ounce of my strength.5

  But Schumann’s matrimonial interest in Ernestine seems to have been very short-lived. His diary for 1835 contains a breathless entry: “Drifting away from Ernestine in the summer & autumn—ah!—With Klara [sic] every day—received a watch ribbon from her on June 8.” A second note, “Broken off with Ernestine,”6 must date from the end of 1835. Both entries were belatedly added in 1838, but they are presumably an accurate reflection of the earlier situation. The news that Ernestine was adopted and therefore not entitled to inherit may have contributed to the break-up, but this is all idle speculation as Ernestine will have had no real chance from the outset: even at that early date the bonds between Clara Wieck and Schumann—or perhaps we should say “between Chiara and Florestan/Eusebius”—were already too close, for what is decisive about this relationship is the element of a friendship between two artists, a friendship that sustained both parties in a way that was almost literally necessary for their survival. “I loved you only as a friend—then as an artist,” we read in the letter from which we have just quoted.7 It may be added that Ernestine married in 1838 but that within a year she was already a widow. She was only twenty-eight when she herself died of typhus in 1844.

  And Clara? Schumann was without doubt a physically attractive young man and, his youth notwithstanding, already successful. At the same time, she knew his weaknesses and problems at firsthand, and some of the things that he admitted to her about the threat to his inner life could certainly have struck her as a warning. Initially, however, she enthused about Schumann as an artist, an enthusiasm that makes sense only if we see her not as an adolescent fantastically gifted as a pianist but as an artist sufficiently respected by Schumann to be accepted as a member of his League of David. Here was the spiritual home that she felt that her father had failed to provide.

  For his part Friedrich Wieck was a musically cultured man whom Schumann, in his initial euphoria, was likewise willing to enroll in his League of David under the name of Master Raro. Wieck never wanted his daughter to be a piano-playing machine but was eager to give her a “general education.”8 Her visit to Dresden was intended not least to allow her to further her studies in composition and singing. In short, Wieck was keen for his daughter to become a successful composer. And yet the care that he lavished on her does not preclude the possibility that the relationship between father and daughter was not only worryingly close but also artistically repressive, allowing the young Clara few opportunities to develop and almost literally driving her into the arms of Florestan and Eusebius, where she was enticed by hopes of the kind of artistic happiness that she could not find in her acclaimed concert appearances and in salon conversations. In early 1835, Wieck accompanied his daughter on a hugely successful tour of northern Germany, functioning as both her escort and her impresario, but his complaint clearly hints at the situation that we have just outlined: “Clara plays reluctantly and really does not want to go on. What is a virtuoso without vanity?”9

  Clara felt an urge to aspire to greater heights in art, the same urge that Wieck—with some disquiet—observed in Schumann, for all that he did not regard him as a suitable son-in-law. By cleaving to Schumann in artistic matters, Clara was not being disloyal to her father’s precepts, but was expressing a side of herself that had remained resolutely unexplored with Wieck, who demanded outward success and an ability to cope with life.

  But how could Wieck have had any deeper understanding of an artistic union between two lovers that is unique in the history of music? And this brings us to an important point: the lovers’ drifting apart and finding each other again, with all the concomitant emotional struggles, feelings of confusion and happiness, and the outbursts of despair that accompanied them on their journey through life from their very first kiss in November 1835 to their engagement on August 14, 1837 and, finally, to their wedding on September 12, 1840, would barely claim our attention unless they were inextricably linked to the lovers’ lives as artists. No one, apart from novelists and their readers, would be interested in the fact that after asking Wieck in vain for Clara’s hand in marriage in September 1837, Schumann despaired of ever being able to marry her, with the result that he may have resumed his liaison with “Christel.” And what would it matter that Clara was by no means averse to being courted by other young gentlemen, including the composer Carl Banck, whom Schumann ridiculed in the pages of his Neue Zeitschrift as Herr de Knapp (Master Short), much to Clara’s annoyance?

  If Schumann and Clara made such heavy weather of their developing relationship, it i
s because of their differing artistic ambitions. And Wieck was not solely to blame for the fact that for long periods the lovers lived apart. Rather, it was their professional lives that drove a wedge between them: Clara was away on tour while Schumann was taking soundings elsewhere, notably during his visit to Vienna, where he wanted to explore the possibility of establishing his Neue Zeitschrift in the city. It was very much while they were away from home that they were most dependent on mutual support. From that point of view their correspondence served at the very least to confirm their own sense of artistic identity—the letters that passed between them in a single year, 1839, run to almost five hundred pages.

  But there was more to it than that, for it was in art that they felt closest—in a literally physical way. Of course, there were plenty of areas of sensitivity—when Clara reported on her successes in the concert hall in January 1838, she went on to strike a note that was not a little piqued: “You won’t be able to understand this enthusiasm [on the part of the audience] as you simply don’t know what I’m capable and incapable of achieving—you know me far too little as an artist.”10 The letter was posted in Vienna, where she had just been appointed chamber virtuosa to the imperial and royal court and—in spite of all the upheaval—completed her opp. 9 and 10. For all that Schumann lavished great praise on these two works, there is no doubt that he was incapable of always adequately appreciating Clara’s achievements, although he continued to write letters filled with sighs of longing that provided Clara with a different kind of support. On Easter Saturday that same year, while he was hard at work on his Kreisleriana, he wrote to her in Vienna:

  When will you stand beside me while I am sitting at the piano—ah! we shall both weep like children! I know, it will overwhelm me. So be cheerful, my heart! Your beautiful slender figure is always standing beside me, and soon you’ll be mine.—But I want to tell you about the other night. I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep—and since I was thinking about you so much and sinking ever more deeply into the life of your soul and your dreams, I suddenly said with tremendous inner strength, “Clara, I’m calling you”—and then I heard right next to me: “Robert, I’m here with you.” I was overcome by a kind of horror at the way in which spirits can communicate with one another over great tracts of land. But I shan’t do it again, this calling out to you; it really affected me.11

  Sentences like these may encourage readers with an interest in depth psychology or even in psychopathology to indulge in all manner of speculations about Schumann’s state of mind, but we should not forget that there were other romantics, too, who regarded music as a real, material force that had the power to enter not only minds but bodies, too. Clara’s own compositions, which provided Schumann with material for his Kreisleriana, may well have ensured that in particular situations he could also feel her physical presence.

  That the experiences described by Schumann were also artistic experiences or at least the harbingers of these is clear from Dichterliebe, his setting of poems by Heinrich Heine that dates from two years later. Here, for example, we read:

  Allnächtlich im Traume seh’ ich dich

  Und sehe dich freundlich grüßen,

  Und laut aufweinend stürz’ ich mich

  Zu deinen süßen Füßen.

  [All night in vision behold I thee,/And see thee greeting me kindly;/And loudly weeping then throw I me/Before thy sweet feet blindly.12]

  Would Schumann have made these lines his own if he had not been familiar with the experience that they describe? Or, to put it another way, would he have told Clara about his own private experiences in such a concisely telling way if he had not already admired Heine’s Book of Songs? Just as the League of David reflects the indissoluble knot between reality and fiction, so the lives of Schumann and Clara Wieck appear to reflect a similar bond between the two. Once again it is hard not to recall Friedrich Schlegel’s idea of a “universal poetry,” for it is very much this idea that is realized here—not just in terms of the interplay between the different arts but also with regard to the oneness of life and art.

  Even the ruses that the lovers were forced to adopt in their dealings with Wieck are not without a poetic dimension. Since he had prohibited his daughter from writing to Schumann and did everything in his power to enforce that ban, the couple had to communicate by using assumed names or else they had to find friends willing to write and receive letters in their name. Writing to Clara in Vienna, Schumann ended one of his interminable missives: “Madame de Dimitrjeff (de Varsovie). Poste restante. You’ll receive my next letter at this address.”13

  “Another letter from me should arrive at ‘Haußner’s’ in Dresden on Wednesday morning,” Schumann wrote on another occasion. “If you’re afraid that your frequent visits to the post office may attract attention, let me know before Tuesday.”14 Clara was certainly afraid that her movements would arouse suspicion, and so we find her replying to Schumann: “I can’t collect any more letters from the post office—they know me there! It was in mortal fear that I left the building today as the man looked at me so ironically and asked: ‘What’s the young lady’s first name?’” She ended with an urgent entreaty: “Couldn’t Dr. Reuter go and see N[anny] when her parents are out for an early morning walk, or meet her and give her a letter to enclose?”15

  But neither Clara herself nor her chambermaid, Nanny, nor Moritz Reuter, who was friendly with the couple, could help out on every occasion, so Clara was reduced to writing to Schumann in Vienna in October 1838 in a state of some agitation:

  I’m expecting a letter from you tomorrow, assuming I can see Reuter—even this source is now cut off from me since Father is threatening to make inquiries to see if Reuter is bringing me news.—Give me an address that I’ll use when I write to you while I’m on tour, I don’t dare write to you at your own address as Father had said that he’ll be able to take his usual steps in every town and city.16

  Even when they were together, the problems did not go away. In the fall of 1838, for example, Schumann was staying with his sister-in-law, Therese, in Zwickau, but even then the lovers could meet secretly in Leipzig only when Wieck was away. Clara wrote to Schumann on September 22 in a state of some desperation: “Father still hasn’t settled on a date.” But a postscript headed “Sunday 5 o’clock” reports the glad tidings: “Father’s leaving at 6, we’re just about to take him to the coach station, so come soon—best wishes.”17 Schumann replied at once:

  The coaches are so unreliable at present. So listen: I’m almost sure that I’ll be able to come past your house tomorrow evening (Tuesday) at 8. So do whatever is necessary to ensure that we may be able to speak. [. . .] You’re quite right that I can’t keep my return to L[eipzig] a secret, but no one will see me until Thursday, so we’ll have Tuesday & Wednesday to ourselves.18

  We can sense the difficulties that the lovers had to endure, but one suspects that there was also an element of pleasure in their secret arrangements and that they enjoyed this game of hide-and-seek; simply devising the many false names under which letters were left at the post office for general delivery must have added to their sense of fun. Schumann’s piano music is full of such masquerades, and the activities of the League of David, as reported in the columns of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, derive much of their appeal from their cryptic qualities and disguises. Here, too, then, there is the same oneness of life and art.

  So abundant is the surviving material that the chronicler would soon be obliged to abandon his narrative in a fit of resignation if he wanted to report on all the vicissitudes of the lovers’ period of engagement in the order in which those events unfolded. A preferable approach would be to see them as a single event with a multiplicity of different facets. In this way we may also come closer to an essential aspect of Schumann’s early piano music, for the individual pieces that make up Carnaval, the Davidsbündlertänze, and Kreisleriana do not form a coherent sequence but must be perceived as a single tableau.

  This view of these works reflects a comm
ent that Schumann once made about a set of Schubert waltzes:

  The way in which the rest of them circle around it [the Sehnsuchtswalzer op. 9, no. 2], more or less spinning a cocoon with their gossamer threads, while a rapt thoughtlessness permeates each and every one of them so that listeners in turn are robbed of the ability to think and believe they are still playing the first one when they have already reached the last—this way is very good.19

  This swirling together of life and work is unique in the history of music and would be inconceivable in the case not only of Mendelssohn but of Wagner, too. True, Wagner “needed” his relationship with Mathilde Wesendonck to summon up the emotional intensity that he required for Tristan und Isolde, but conceptually speaking the two are unconnected. This was not true of the young Schumann, whose musical works were created from the spirit in which he lived, just as his life was grounded in the spirit in which he created his music. Of course, each of these two forms of discourse can be considered on its own, but it is more useful if, as “re-creative listeners” we take them both together.

  It remains for us to consider the legal proceedings between the parties, an affair that, like many a private prosecution, is not without its carnivalesque qualities, even if it lacks any sense of romantic poetry. The Germans have a proverb, “Trennungen verbinden” (“separations bind us together”), that Wieck chose from the outset to ignore, and this was arguably his biggest mistake. On the other hand, it is easy to understand why he underestimated the obstinacy of the two lovers, for which other underage daughter would have dared at that time to oppose her father’s wishes? The case was also particularly difficult: Clara had grown up more or less without a mother, leaving Wieck to believe that he was playing the part of both parents. He took every care to educate her and accompanied her on many of her concert tours. For her part, Clara remained inwardly and outwardly loyal to him, at least up to the time of their legal altercation, as she still hoped that the matter would be settled amicably.