Robert Schumann: The Life and Work of a Romantic Composer

by Martin Geck

  CHAPTER 7

  Married Life in Leipzig—Visit to Russia (1840–44)

  Talents, health, thriving children, sincere affection—this, too, means something and cannot be measured in terms of mere wealth. But of course we must think of this, too, and also of safeguarding my livelihood, that, too, is bound to come.

  Robert Schumann, entry in his marriage diary, June 28, 1843

  I expect you’ll then always travel by steam train. But please take extreme care: never look out of the carriage, never stand up, never get out until the carriage has come to a complete standstill. The very idea already makes me feel uneasy.”2 Schumann wrote these lines to Clara while she was staying in Paris in June 1839. It is hard to believe from his warnings that in spite of his fear of heights he was in fact a railway enthusiast—it was as such that he wrote to his sister-in-law Therese on April 28, 1837 on the occasion of the official opening of the Leipzig–Althen stretch of the line from Leipzig to Dresden: “Therese, a glance at the steam train is enough to cure you! Tears came to my eyes in awe at what the human spirit is capable of achieving.”3

  Under the circumstances it is no wonder that Schumann was keen to travel with his wife on the newly completed stretch of line, which he finally did on June 1, 1841. For that reason if for no other, he would have been happy to leave his second-floor apartment in a magnificent new complex of buildings at 5 (now 18) Inselstraße, where he had been living since his marriage on September 12, 1840 (the building has now been successfully restored to all its former glory, inviting visitors to explore the rooms once occupied by the couple).

  On their arrival in Dresden, they were delighted by the “beautiful Elbe with its vineyards to one side,” Clara wrote in their marriage diary, prompting Schumann to describe his wife as an ideal “traveling companion” and “companion in life,” “willing, cheerful, solicitous, and always kind and loving.”4 The marriage diary that they jointly kept from the day on which they married until the end of their visit to Russia in late March 1844 reflects an aim that Schumann had expressed as early as 1839: “Posterity shall see us entirely as a single heart and soul.”5

  In the light of this aim, it is noteworthy that the couple occasionally aired their disagreements in the pages of their diary. They had been married for less than two weeks when Clara noted without further ado: “It’s bad that Robert can hear me in his room when I’m playing, so that I can’t work during the morning, which is the best time for serious study.”6 But the desire on the couple’s part to spare each other’s feelings was far more powerful. And so we find Schumann—less and less evident as a diarist—summing up the forty-fifth to forty-seventh weeks of their first year of marriage: “Soon it will be the fifty-second week! What do you think, little Klara [sic]? Do you still like being married? I do—pretty much. We’ll always stick together.”7 The phrase “pretty much” was no doubt a comic understatement.

  Clara was even more anxious than her husband to keep things on an even keel, a point that she addressed in her very next entry:

  I’ve been feeling really quite dreadful during the last three days! I don’t seem to be making any headway at all, and so Robert has to show me some consideration. My most heartfelt prayer to God is that He should never take my Robert away from me—that would be the saddest thing that I could imagine!—I still need lots of time to show Robert all the love that I feel for him—it really is quite infinite!8

  By then Clara was heavily pregnant and needed help herself, but she was still capable of noting that “Robert is so loving and kind, and never looks cross, even when I complain that he’s making things too easy for me.”9 This is as good a time as any to ask the obligatory question of whether theirs was a happy marriage.

  Even asking the question necessarily means bringing to the discussion our own understanding of what a happy marriage involves. Following Schumann’s death, commentators spent the next century hymning an “ideal marriage between two artists.” This was undoubtedly true when seen from the standpoint of a man evidently wanting an artist at his side: he could scarcely have done better than Clara Wieck. Familiar with his work from an early age, she was his interpreter, friend, and helpmate all in one. Before and during their marriage she played his piano music whenever it seemed appropriate to do so. The piano music that she studied also served to inspire her husband: they regularly worked through Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier, and even as late as 1845 they were still studying counterpoint together.

  Clara was just as impatient as Schumann before the completion of each new composition and prior to its publication would work through every one of his pieces that was written for the piano, encouraging him wherever she could and admiring him as a composer to the point of denying her own abilities in that field. How would he have survived if his genius had not been flattered in this way? And then there were the countless daily chores bound up with their lives as artists: Clara not only worked as an arranger and a copyist but also acted as intermediary between her husband, who was becoming increasingly afraid of contact and conflicts with the outside world, and the ensembles that he had to direct. We shall return to this point in due course.

  But how does this “ideal marriage between artists” seem when looked at from Clara’s point of view? She clearly played second fiddle, or, to put it another way, in spite of the seven children that she had to bring up, she would undoubtedly have been able to write more music in a more uninhibited way and certainly would have been able to practice more and give more concerts and recitals if she had not had to worry about her husband. On the other hand, Schumann provided her with innumerable artistic ideas, inspiring her and encouraging her to compose.

  It was Schumann’s idea, for example, to collaborate with Clara on a volume of songs based on poems from Rückert’s Liebesfrühling (Love’s spring), a volume that appeared in print in September 1841. Among Clara’s contributions to it is the magnificent setting of “Er ist gekommen in Sturm und Regen.” Schumann, too, was highly complimentary about her work. The fact that he declined to include one of her four Rückert settings in the volume had a plausible explanation: presumably the piece was difficult to accommodate within a cycle planned in the form of a dialogue.10 If we accept this line of argument, then we may also dismiss the recent claim that Schumann could not abide the poem because it failed to reflect his own aesthetic outlook as a lieder composer. While no one would contest the right of the author of Die andere Clara Schumann (The other Clara Schumann) to advance such a view, it is impossible to uphold the same writer’s unsubstantiated claim that Schumann also removed Clara’s song “Er ist gekommen in Sturm und Regen” from their joint collection.11 This can scarcely be explained as a simple error of fact but is indicative, rather, of the general tendency to give Schumann a raw deal. As such, this raises a further point.

  The fact that women composers found life more difficult than their male counterparts in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is beyond doubt—Fanny Hensel and Alma Mahler both had a good deal to say on the subject. But whereas Fanny Hensel was kept on a tight rein by her brother and Alma Mahler shocked her husband by telling him that she wanted to write music of her own, we have already seen that Schumann responded with warmth and sincerity to his wife’s compositional ambitions. The situation for married artists during this period is clear from the case of the famous soprano Henriette Sontag, who had to abandon the public arena in 1830 and spend the next nineteen years in retirement when it became known that she had married the Sardinian diplomat Count Carlo Rossi. In spite of her seven children, Clara Schumann was in a far more enviable position with her “artists’ marriage” to Schumann.

  Our present concern, however, is not to play one female artist’s career against that of another but to ask if the Schumanns’ was a happy marriage. For a difficult man like Schumann, it was no doubt the best solution, and the same was true on a private, personal level—at least to the extent that it is possible to separate man and artist. While it is true that during their engagement
he had expressed the wish that Clara should abandon her career and that during their years of marriage he suffered a good deal from his marginal status during her concert tours, it is also the case that there were few things in his life that did not cause him sufferings of one kind or another. It is no accident, therefore, that even as late as September 1852 he wrote to his friend Johann Verhulst in The Hague: “I was pleased to find you as sprightly as of old. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of me! Perhaps kind spirits will restore me to my former state. I was also pleased to find that you’ve won for yourself such a dear wife. In that respect we share the same happy lot.”12

  Regardless of the vicissitudes that beset Schumann’s marriage and the many psychological crises that did not make married life any easier, we may well be disposed to take this last remark seriously. A handful of writers with an interest in depth psychology have claimed that the couple grew apart during their later years together, although I myself am reluctant to trace such a curve on the basis of the surviving evidence. What seems to me to be more important is the fact that both Schumann and Clara remained convinced from first to last that they were destined for one another.

  Clara herself undoubtedly imagined that marriage would be easier than it turned out to be. But, however unfashionable it may be to say this today, there are some marriage partners who do not blame each other for any problems that may arise but prefer to see those difficulties as a part of the fate that they have to deal with together—not that this should prevent us from admiring the resolve that Clara Schumann brought to her marriage and, indeed, to the remainder of her long life.

  Particularly remarkable is the moral rigor that Schumann and Clara displayed in demanding of themselves and of each other that they should both lead blameless lives: loving, faithful, enthusiastic, conscious of their duties, hardworking, thrifty, and successful. They were both keen that Schumann should hold a reputable post and that Clara’s concerts should be seen as purely in the service of art; as such, their wishes were understandable in the context of their marriage’s prehistory, but there was still something almost compulsive about this desire. As for the expense of leading their chosen lives, they sometimes seem to have been more afraid of financial problems than their actual situation gave them cause to be. On a subliminal level they took their cue from the upper-middle-class Mendelssohns and Hensels, two families who seemed to have everything in superabundance and whose everyday lives appeared to run like clockwork.

  The constant pressure they placed on themselves is typical of the lower middle classes, but as far as Schumann’s music and art in general were concerned, this acted more as a stimulus than as an inhibiting factor. It pleased him to be regarded as a man of action who professionally speaking was abreast of his times and was contributing to an art that he increasingly regarded as quintessentially German. And not least of the virtues of the German artist was tireless industry. He was proud to think that he possessed this quality. If ever he lacked creative ideas as a composer, he could at least write fugues.

  But let us return to the Schumanns’ first year of marriage. Their lives in the Inselstraße in Leipzig were comfortably middle class. They had a female cook and a chambermaid, although Clara still found herself performing unusual housewifely tasks—during her second week of marriage she describes a supper party in her marriage diary attended by Julius and Emilie Carl, Moritz Emil Reuter, and Ernst Ferdinand Wenzel: “All my anxieties as a housewife robbed me of my appetite, making me fear that the guests would not like the food or that there wouldn’t be enough to go round.”13 Schumann himself had reported his delight only a few paragraphs earlier: “First course. Suspense on the faces of the participants. It tasted excellent. [. . .] My Clara is showing every sign of becoming a charming hostess.”14

  Neither initially nor later was there any shortage of housekeeping money, with the result that for the most part Schumann was able to overcome his father-in-law’s fears: between 1840 and 1848 he earned between 300 and 600 thalers a year. This was no mean sum. Even so, he had good reason to complain in 1843 that “we are spending more than we’re earning.”15 He had to draw on the capital accruing to him from various legacies but was pleased that the couple’s visit to Russia, initially undertaken with a distinct lack of enthusiasm, netted a profit of 2,300 thalers. And to Schumann’s credit it may be noted that between 1849 and 1853, his income from his compositions rose from 1,300 to 1,900 thalers per annum. At least during his years in Düsseldorf from 1850 to 1854 he was—materially speaking—remarkably successful.

  Nevertheless, he needed his annual Düsseldorf salary of 750 thalers to support his large family in the style appropriate to his social standing.16 When she was seventeen, Clara had told her admirer in no uncertain terms:

  There’s one thing I have to tell you—namely, that I cannot be yours until circumstances are completely different. I don’t want horses and I don’t want diamonds, I’m happy to be your possession, but I do want to lead a life free from care and I know that I wouldn’t be happy if I were unable to continue working in the field of art—and as for worries about food, no, that would be insufferable. I need a lot, and I can see that a lot is needed to lead a respectable life.17

  As far as the financial aspect of these demands was concerned, Schumann was for the most part able to meet them, even though he suspected—perhaps correctly—that the spirit of Friedrich Wieck lay behind them.18 And to the extent that Clara was obliged to help out, she was undoubtedly pleased to be able to contribute to the family finances by continuing her professional career as a pianist during her years of marriage.

  There was certainly plenty for the newlywed Schumann to do. He continued—albeit increasingly reluctantly—to edit his Neue Zeitschrift; he took a lively interest in the musical scene in Leipzig; and he applauded his wife when she took part in a performance of Bach’s Triple Concerto at the city’s Gewandhaus at a soirée organized by Mendelssohn. He also maintained contact with musicians and music lovers, and together with Clara he kept an open house—so much so that it was not long before he was complaining about the “constant interruptions from visitors.”19 He went on tour with Clara and, back at home, he read to her from Rückert’s great poem in terza rima, Edelstein und Perle (Precious stone and pearl). He also explained Bach’s fugues to her. Above all, however, he composed.

  By the end of January 1841 he had largely abandoned the world of lieder in order to concentrate on large-scale orchestral works. His first numbered symphony—the Spring Symphony in B-flat Major op. 38—was sketched in the incredibly short space of only four days, but since he still had little experience of instrumentation, it took him rather longer to complete the full orchestral score. Even so, the work received its first performance at the Gewandhaus on March 31, when Mendelssohn conducted from the manuscript score. The concert was mounted as a fundraiser for the orchestra’s pension fund and was organized by Clara, who also played the second and third movements of Chopin’s Piano Concerto in F Minor. The performances were enthusiastically received by the audience and proved a triumph for the newlywed couple.

  Friedrich Wieck is said to have called the Spring Symphony a “Symphony of Contradictions,” by which he meant that Schumann had written it expressly to contradict him.20 There may be a grain of truth in this, although few individuals could flaunt a symphony in their father-in-law’s face as a token of their rebellion. Conversely, Schumann had good reasons for dedicating the work to King Friedrich August II of Saxony. Only major works are inscribed to potentates—works that can be performed by a court orchestra and that can ideally commend their composer as a candidate for the post of Kapellmeister. (Of course, Schumann’s chances of acceding to such a post in Dresden were poor, for Wagner was just beginning his reign in the city, and Mendelssohn had a better hand.)

  Be that as it may, Schumann was now resolved to add to his reputation and improve his income by writing large-scale works. Remarkably, he not only aspired to doing so, he actually achieved his aim and wrote several large
-scale orchestral works within the space of a year. At the risk of exaggeration, one could argue that Brahms took fourteen years to write his first symphony, which, when it finally appeared, seemed to be carved in stone. Schumann’s First Symphony, conversely, creates a more carefree, optimistic, and youthful impression in keeping with the opening line of a poem by Adolf Böttger that provides the piece with its alternative title: “Im Tale blüht der Frühling auf” (In vale and valley spring has come). The meter of the opening line additionally echoes that of the symphony’s opening motif.

  Schumann was right to claim that this work was “born in an ardent hour.”21 Who would have thought him capable of producing such a positive, large-scale piece that in many respects strikes an almost affirmative note? If he had died before having written it, psychologists interested in the creative process would undoubtedly have had no difficulty in claiming that in the light of his unstable psychiatric state he would never have been able to compose such a work. But the symphony exists, and it may serve as a warning—not as a disincentive to seek to understand Schumann’s “rare states of mind” but as a reminder of the dangers of thinking that we know it all.

  In the wake of his First Symphony, Schumann wrote his Overture, Scherzo, and Finale op. 52, his Piano Fantasy in A Minor, which he later expanded and turned into his Piano Concerto in A Minor op. 54 (see Intermezzo V), and the first version of his D Minor Symphony, which later became his Fourth Symphony op. 120. A first opus of another kind, the Schumanns’ first child, Marie, was born at 10:50 on the morning of September 1, 1841, “to the accompaniment of thunder and lightning.”22 Mendelssohn was the child’s godfather. At the end of the year the couple traveled to Weimar, where Schumann was able to hear his First Symphony again and Clara performed Mendelssohn’s Capriccio for piano and orchestra.