by Martin Geck
One wonders if Schumann raised his eyes to look at this Madonna when he thought up or wrote down the section “In the Tone of a Legend” in the opening movement of his Fantasy op. 17. One does not need to be a writer of kitsch to ask this question, for anyone performing this piece is bound to welcome a more detailed explanation of the muted, hymnlike gesture that temporarily dampens the sense of agitation that the work exudes until then. It is by no means far-fetched to think of a Marian aura at this point, for in the early 1840s Schumann, in spite of his Lutheran upbringing, is known to have regarded the subject of the Virgin Mary as an “excellent text” for an oratorio.40 And his Düsseldorf Mass op. 147 includes a particularly beautiful offertory based on the words “Tota pulchra es, Maria” (You are all beautiful, Mary).
Schumann’s aforementioned visit to Vienna lasted from November 1838 to April 1839 and kept him away from his familiar surroundings. He was there to take soundings and see if he and Clara could make a living for themselves in a city that was also an important center of music. After all, Wieck had declared categorically that he would allow his daughter to marry Schumann only on condition that the couple moved away from Saxony. Vienna, where Clara had just been appointed chamber virtuosa to the imperial and royal court, seemed an obvious choice. Having no wish to be a kept man, Schumann wanted to find out if his Neue Zeitschrift could be successfully transferred to Vienna.
On the other hand, he had by now already begun to drift away from what had once been his favorite project: sales were falling, and the daily grind was oppressive. While Vienna could have given the paper a new momentum, various discussions with local publishers failed to produce any tangible results. Schumann was also warned that the Austrian censor was particularly vigilant, and to make matters worse, Wieck was plotting against him in faraway Leipzig. In April 1839, Schumann returned to Germany without any sign of outward success, but with a whole series of new ideas and a particular jewel in the form of Schubert’s Symphony in C Major (Great), a copy of which Schubert’s brother, Ferdinand, had presented to him. Mendelssohn gave the first performance of the hitherto unknown work at a Gewandhaus concert on March 21, 1839, even before Schumann himself had returned to the city and well before Viennese audiences had a chance to hear the symphony. Three further performances followed in December 1839 and March and April 1840, giving Schumann ample opportunity to wax lyrical about the “heavenly length” of the work in the columns of his Neue Zeitschrift. It was, he went on, “flooded with a romanticism” found elsewhere in the composer’s output.41 By now, Schumann was sufficiently well known as a critic in Leipzig for the publisher Heinrich Brockhaus to seek to engage his services for the Leipziger Allgemeine Zeitung. A messenger even turned up at Schumann’s house on December 1, 1840 to ask for a review of the recent concert appearance of the violinist Ole Bull at the Gewandhaus. The messenger, Brockhaus explained, would wait until the review was ready.
Soon Schumann himself was writing “great music” for the Gewandhaus. But first there was—in his own words—a “rich blessing of songs.”42
This plaster relief of Robert and Clara Schumann was made by the Dresden sculptor Ernst Rietschel in January 1846 at the request of the Leipzig publisher Hermann Härtel. The couple sat for the artist several times and were very pleased with the result, although there had apparently been some “arguments” in the run-up to the sittings (Tagebücher 3/1:412). Schumann’s grandson Ferdinand added a note to the relevant entry in the couple’s housekeeping book: “Hiller wanted Clara to be at the front in Rietschel’s double medallion. Schumann refused, insisting that the creative artist should take precedence over the re-creative, performing artist” (Tagebücher 3/1:756). Copies of this relief can still be found on the secondhand market today. (Photograph courtesy of the private archive of Gerd Nauhaus.)
CHAPTER 6
The “Year of Song” (1840)
“In Foreign Lands”
I hear the brooklets rushing
This way and that in the wood.
In the wood and in the rushing
I know not where I am.
Joseph von Eichendorff, set by Schumann in his Liederkreis op. 39, no. 8
We would be doing Schumann no favors by describing as “perfect” the piano pieces that he wrote before 1840. Even calling Mendelssohn’s contemporaneous Songs Without Words perfect is tantamount to an act of canonization that is dubious in the extreme—people who want to be perfect are wary of taking risks, and was there ever a man more willing to take risks than the young Schumann? When looking back over his early piano works, he himself gave serious thought to the question of whether they demanded too much intellectual volatility from their audiences. But without the courage to essay the fragmentary and the aphoristic, he would never have written Carnaval or Kreisleriana, and there would have been none of the romantic art as understood by writers such as Friedrich Schlegel, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Jean Paul, Heinrich Heine, and, of course, Schumann himself.
But then came the “year of song,” with its major cycles of lieder to poems by Justinus Kerner, Joseph von Eichendorff, Heine, Adelbert Chamisso, and Friedrich Rückert. And here one is tempted to speak, if not of perfection, then of a degree of success that is altogether breathtaking. Poetry and music embrace each other, and a romantic dream comes true, the two notions of “universal poetry” and of a “synthesis of the arts” achieving a hitherto unsuspected sense of fulfillment in the unassuming form of the piano-accompanied song.
Even as early as the summer of 1839, Schumann had written to his colleague Hermann Hirschbach: “Or are you perhaps like me—someone who all his life has placed vocal compositions below instrumental music and never regarded them as great art? But don’t tell anyone I’ve said this!”1 Until then, Schumann had been proud of his ability to write music with no regard for a given text or for a far-reaching set of formal rules. The listener was to “recreate” the pianist’s state of mind as the latter sat composing at the piano. In the longer term, this required a certain amount of effort and was bound to give rise to self-doubts, for who, on observing the many characters and masks that scurried past them as the composer had seen them spring up, could identify the Schumann their composer wanted them to see?
It was time for something new, albeit not wholly unexpected. After all, Schumann had already written a handful of youthful songs, and there was also a diary entry from 1833 that mentions an unrealized project: “Musical poems, with underlaid songs by Heinrich Heine, written & dedicated to Heine.”2 And at a time when he was ostensibly not interested in writing songs of his own, Schumann was busily reviewing lieder by fellow composers and as if in passing formulating his own aesthetic views on song-writing. Finally, on the evening of June 25, 1838, “after a few days feeling inwardly depressed to the point of collapse,” he attended a concert given by the then sixteen-year-old Pauline García and, although he was “as dead as a doornail,” he found “tears flooding” down his cheeks “within the first few minutes of her starting to sing.”3
A similar sense of liberation made itself felt as soon as he started to write songs of his own: “Dreaming & music-making now leaves me practically dead; I could die of it,” he told Clara while working on Myrthen, his wedding gift for his bride-to-be. “Ah, Klara [sic], what a joy it is to write for the voice. It’s a pleasure I’ve forgone for far too long.”4
Looking back on this period from the vantage point of 1854, Schumann is said to have described the antepenultimate song, “Du bist wie eine Blume,” as the first of his “year of song”—this version of events came to the attention of Brahms who in turn passed it on to Clara, adding that she herself struck him “wie eine Blume” (like a flower). A recently discovered source indicates that this song dates from January 23, 1840. Thereafter Schumann composed his lieder at a speed that is barely conceivable, as is clear from the dates of only the best-known cycles: most of the songs that make up Myrthen op. 25 were composed between early February and the middle of March; the Eichendorff Liederkreis op. 39 was completed i
n two bursts between May 1 and 9 and between May 16 and 22; Dichterliebe op. 48 between May 24 and June 1; and eight of the ten songs that make up Chamisso’s Frauenliebe und -leben op. 42 were sketched on the afternoons of July 11 and 12, 1840.
Evidently Schumann found it easier to write for the voice than for the piano. Whereas a number of his previous piano pieces had needed several versions and years of polishing to produce a coherent work on the basis of ideas that emerged almost by themselves from his improvisations at the piano, his songs, though still requiring the odd correction, demanded no lengthy reflections on their formal design. Often Schumann would write down only the vocal line, while allowing himself more time to work on the accompaniment. In a letter that he wrote to Clara on February 24, 1840, he explained: “Generally I write [the songs] standing or walking, not at the piano. After all, it is a very different kind of music that is not initially carried through the fingers but is much more immediate & melodious.”5
Is it Clara to whom we owe this spring-like outpouring of lieder? No doubt she was an important catalyst—it must in part have been the prospect of marriage that finally allowed Schumann to summon up those communicative abilities needed to write songs that draw their strength from the tension between “I” and “you.” But if the floodgates opened, it was to express more than just feelings of happiness, for at least during the early part of 1840, darker moods predominated, moods triggered by years of struggle and anguish that culminated in a death wish. Heine’s line “Ich hab’ im Traum geweinet” (I wept while dreaming) speaks a language that is unequivocally clear while at the same time serving as merely one example among many of a whole number of songs that deal with pain and sorrow. But the medium of the song also smoothed Schumann’s path from the subjectivity of the individual “I” to the subjectivity of the couple, the couple in this case being not only Schumann and Clara but also Schumann and his poet of the moment.
It is also worth stressing that Clara was not only a catalyst but also a coworker and in the case of Liebesfrühling op. 37, even a cocomposer. Toward the end of the 1830s, Schumann began to compile a collection of verse under the title “Copies of Various Poems for Composition.” In the end, it included 169 handwritten entries, 94 of which were set to music by Schumann, 7 by Clara. Of the 169 poems, 15 were by Eichendorff and were copied out by Clara. Since these poems were almost all set to music as part of the Liederkreis op. 39, one would dearly like to know whether Clara was acting on Schumann’s instructions or whether it was she herself who chose these poems. Whatever the answer, it remains a fact that Schumann, as well motivated as he was well versed in literature, pursued his own independent studies: his collection of aphorisms includes thirteen texts by Eichendorff, all of which appeared in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik from the spring of 1840 onward.
I am not, of course, trying to suggest that Schumann’s inner drive to write lieder or Clara’s inspirational proximity were all that it required to produce the impressive fruits of his “year of song,” for there are also plausible pragmatic considerations to be taken into account here. As a husband, Schumann had to earn money and escape from the state of anonymity within which he had to a certain extent been able to languish as the editor of, and contributor to, his own Neue Zeitschrift. The paper had never been intended as a life-time’s project and was now in crisis. And piano pieces could provide a livelihood only for virtuosos capable of performing them in person in well-filled concert halls. As we know, Schumann was unable to do this, and a few favorable reviews cannot blind us to the fact that his own piano pieces, of which only a handful of copies were sold, were known above all to insiders—even Clara was wary about including them in her programs.
By writing lieder, Schumann hoped to achieve more than this. In this regard, his practicality is clear from the fact that “Lotosblume” from Myrthen exists not only in a version for solo voice and piano but also in a parallel version for male-voice choir, while we know that he was also thinking of writing an entire volume of four-part songs. No less deliberate was his decision to tackle complete cycles of songs in the tradition of the late Schubert and to follow up the motley bridal bouquet of Myrthen with other collections devoted to a single poet. Such “monothematic” song cycles were taken seriously as settings of works of literature and provided a guarantee that the composer had links with the literary scene—Eichendorff, Heine, Chamisso, and Rückert were all reckoned among the leading poets of their age.
Even more emphatically than Schubert, whom we may loosely describe as his “predecessor” in this respect, Schumann sought out poets and poems that reflected his own view of life, enabling him to identify with the subject matter and at the same time giving him room to breathe—he did not have to set aside his own emotions, nor did he have to reinvent them for each new song. Rather, he was able to read them on the lips of the poet and conjure them up through the medium of his music. Here his ability to concentrate on a single poet in the course of each cycle is of major significance. On the one hand, Schumann was able to cling to the procedures that were typical of his piano pieces and juxtapose “idiosyncratically formed miniatures”6 that often rush past us with surprising speed—at around thirty-five seconds, “Die Rose, die Lilie, die Taube, die Sonne” holds the record in this regard. On the other hand, however, Schumann avoids the danger that one title could “destroy” the next one, a danger that he had feared in the case of Papillons. Now it is the poetry that functions as a link holding the songs together, or, to put it another way, it is the magnet that keeps the individual songs in alignment like iron filings, no matter how different those songs may be.
The fact that Schumann’s songs for voice and piano are generally better known than his piano compositions, even though they are no less progressive than the piano pieces, is due not only to the greater acceptance of the song as a medium but also to our empirical perception that in songs the idea of the cycle is more apparent to our senses. In the piano piece the countless nuances that it contains can easily be lost in the flood of sounds, whereas listeners may more readily interpret these nuances as facets of the whole when they are combined with poetry. Even if this whole is not laid down as something incontrovertible, it can nonetheless be sensed in the symbiosis of text and music.
I use the word “symbiosis” metaphorically in an attempt to come closer to defining the underlying tendency in Schumann’s musical poetry. Pointless though it may be to play off Schumann’s song cycles against those of Schubert, it is still clear that they contain so many novel elements that we can legitimately speak of an aesthetic paradigm shift. Particularly innovative is Schumann’s decision not to home in on the poem’s formal structure but to take as his starting point what he himself termed the “new spirit of poetry.” This was a spirit that he found first and foremost in the verse of Rückert, Eichendorff, Uhland, and Heine, whose poetry, he explained, was better suited to a “more artistic and more profound type of song,” making it possible for the composer to “reproduce the poem in its actual depth.”7
In many of Schubert’s songs, whether strophic or through-composed, the structure of the poem provides the riverbed over which the music flows, and the piano writing, however original, serves merely an ancillary function, accompanying the voice in the truest sense of the term and further supporting the position that the voice already has within the structure of the poem. From this point of view, Schubert was still rooted in the tradition of the folksong, in which the distribution of the roles was self-evident, and although he occasionally broke out of this mold, he never seriously called it into question.
But this is precisely what Schumann did in his songs. He believed that as a genre, the song could pave the way for a deeper relationship between the poetic word and the poetry of the music only if the composer could break free from convention. This was not least a question of intellect; the composer should not simply enter the world of the poem but look down on it from a greater height. He could then decide impartially how a strophic poem can be wedded to music that
does not have to worry about such preconceived structures. In an extreme case he could even bring to a well-ordered poem a chaos all of his own without causing everything to collapse. Although he also wrote songs in a folk tone or with the hint of a folk-like element, this was always a stylistic device to be used only when needed.
There were two reasons, above all, for Schumann’s ability to think and work on the highest level when it came to lieder. First, he could count himself, if not a poet, then at least a member of the confraternity of poets. And, second, his piano pieces had provided him with plentiful experience of writing music that as far as possible avoided confining formal rules. In 1843, in the course of a review of Robert Franz’s lieder, Schumann looked back on this period and described exactly what it was that had made his “year of song” possible:
We know that between 1830 and 1834 there was a reaction against the prevailing taste. In essence, the battle was not a hard one to win, for it was designed to combat the formulas and empty phrases that revealed themselves principally in piano music. And it was in piano music that the first attack was launched, passage-work being replaced by rather more thoughtful structures.
In writing these lines, Schumann was praising the League of David, including himself. And yet he clearly saw his own role as a piano composer in a distinctly negative light when he went on: “And in reality it is perhaps the song that is the only genre in which there has been any real progress since Beethoven.”8
In lieder composition the equivalents of “passage-work” and “empty phrases” were an unimaginative insistence on schematic patterns and insensitivity to the relationship between the words and the music. Reviewing a group of songs by Norbert Burgmüller, Schumann complained that “in Schubert’s case, the idea of retaining a particular figure throughout an entire song was something new; younger song composers should be warned against this mannerism.” Even Schubert often “laid it on with a trowel” when it came to his accompaniments.9
