by Martin Geck
Schumann’s pen drawing of the Kremlin, April or May 1844. (Photograph courtesy of the Robert Schumann Museum, Zwickau.)
Intermezzo V
The Magic of Allusions
A brief tutti chord in the full orchestra serves as the starting pistol for three bars of cascading quarter- and eighth-notes in the piano. As such, this passage harkens back to the traditional opening gesture of a baroque overture, while the interval of a minor second around which the passage is centered has always been associated with the idea of a sigh. Eight bars of a lyrical first subject are entrusted to the woodwinds and horns, after which the piano adds a further eight bars of its own to produce a sixteen-bar period. Far from pausing to rest, the composer then continues to spin out the musical argument in a passage in which the piano’s baritone register assumes the lead, while accompanied by filigree quintuplets in the right hand. But this is not just Fortspinnung in the sense defined by Wilhelm Fischer: it is also an “answer” with its own thematic significance. The “answer” expands to the accompaniment of a growing involvement of the orchestra to which the piano briefly abandons the melodic line, itself assuming the function of a bass. And so the musical argument proceeds, intricately interwoven, until a liberating six-four chord on G provides the first subject with a platform on which to build in the key of C major: the heavens appear to stand open before us.
It is impossible within the space available to describe all the musical and metrical subtleties that make this movement what it is: a piano-symphonic miracle occupying a position between Beethoven and Brahms. And if their concertos are more solid in form and character, then Schumann’s undoubtedly possesses a greater sense of poetry. In any discussion of nineteenth-century works still indebted to the earlier tradition, the use of terms such as “opening ritornello,” “solo exposition,” “first subject-group,” “bridge passage,” “second subject-group,” “exposition,” “development section,” and “recapitulation” is already problematical, but in Schumann’s case it amounts to an insult. The miracle of the Piano Fantasy in A Minor—only later turned into the opening movement of Piano Concerto op. 54—is that it manages to escape from the rules that inform such works and does so, moreover, with sovereign ease. While avoiding impressionist diffuseness, this fantasy refuses to be pinned down to any of the usual categories of musical form but demands to be judged in terms of its narrative qualities.
The opening bars of the Concerto for the Pianoforte (1841), the forerunner of the opening movement of the Piano Concerto in A Minor op. 54. (Photograph courtesy of the Heinrich Heine Institute of the Regional Capital of Düsseldorf.)
Narrativity does not mean that Schumann is telling a story here. After all, he had no time for the Lisztian symphonic poem. What it does mean is that the floodtide of the music is like the flow of a narrative. This has nothing to do with symmetry. In the case of a real river, too, there is a constant shift between stronger and weaker currents, between surging waves and tiny eddies, and between passages that are now calm, now more agitated, quite apart from the changing landscape on the riverbank. But the simile does throw light on the procedures of a composer who allows himself to be carried along by an initial idea as if it were the subject of a conversation maintained over an entire movement. The sense is not that of a motific development planned in advance, but of a willingness to go where the spirit takes him.
Even so, this willingness to be driven in disparate directions is by no means lacking in a plan, a point that becomes clear when the movement reaches its slow middle section, an Andante espressivo. No matter how brief it may be, this is the spiritual heart of the piece. We are in A-flat major, light-years away from the opening key; and the main idea now appears in a gently rocking 6/4 meter, albeit foreshortened to one and a half bars. This type of narrative mode was much favored by Schumann—at the equivalent place in the C Major Fantasy op. 17 he added the marking “In the Tone of a Legend.” It emerges even more forcefully from the original version of the piece, even if the surviving evidence allows us to reconstruct this version only in part. Here a thunderous transitional passage lasting twenty-two bars in missing, Schumann having decided to introduce it only in the definitive version of the three-movement concerto. Only by the later date had he begun to take a greater interest in structural stability.
For unbiased listeners, narrativity means immersing ourselves in a gripping and nuanced performance whose train of ideas may not all be ultimately intelligible—nor is there any obligation on us to understand them—but whose ideas convince us through their charm and organic flow. And those of us who listen to the Piano Fantasy against the background of our knowledge of the Schumanns’ lives will hear in it a regular story that we can leaf through as if it were a book.
The story begins with Schumann writing his A Minor Fantasy in response to a piano concerto in the same key that Clara had written as her op. 7 between her thirteenth and seventeenth birthdays. Schumann had helped her with the instrumentation of its final movement and in his own piece he took over a motif from the earlier work. But with the exception of this reminiscence, his fantasy is in fact more of a rejoinder to Clara’s op. 7. Although the skill with which the young artist was able to write a virtuoso concerto tailored to existing models deserves our admiration, when compared with the specific magic of Schumann’s composition, her concerto seems no more than an empty stage designed to display her own talents.
Clara would have been the last person to disagree with this assessment of the two works, and she never again played her own piano concerto after she married Schumann. By way of compensation, Schumann honored her in his own composition: the motif of a descending third, C–B–A–A, which permeates his fantasy from beginning to end, is a coded version of Chiara, the name Clara was given as a member of the League of David. Even more significantly, a sketch has recently come to light for a duet based on a poem by Friedrich Rückert. The woman begins: “I am your tree, O gardener, whose faithfulness maintains me in love’s care and keeping.” To which the man replies: “I am your gardener, O tree of faithfulness, I feel no jealous desire for any other happiness.”1 This duet was originally intended for Liebesfrühling op. 37, a collaboration between husband and wife, but in the end it was omitted as the main idea had in the meantime found a niche for itself in the Piano Fantasy as the musical motif of the central Andante espressivo. First stated by the piano before being taken up by the clarinet, where it is transposed by the same interval of a second as that found in the duet, this motif can be underlaid with the words “Ich bin dein Baum, o Gärtner, dessen Treue” (I am your tree, O gardener, whose faithfulness . . .). Both pieces—the original sketch for the duet and the Andante espressivo of the Piano Fantasy—are in 3/4 time. And both are in A-flat major. It is as if Schumann regarded this key as somehow off limits and sacrosanct “in order to compose a concerto in A minor around it.”2
But there is even more to this “magic of allusions”: from the musical quotation of “You are my tree,” a journey takes us back in time to a passage in A-flat major in Beethoven’s Fidelio—namely, the opening line of Florestan’s aria, “In des Lebens Frühlingstagen,” which goes on to describe his vision of his wife, Leonore, coming to console him in the guise of an angel. Throughout the difficult years of their engagement, Schumann and Clara had seen themselves in the roles of Florestan and Fidelio/Leonore: on November 29, 1837, for example, Schumann had written to her from Vienna: “I kiss you with heartfelt love.—Adieu, my Fidelio in the form of Julius Kraus. Be faithful to me as Leonore was to her Florestan.”3 (Julius Kraus was the name that Clara used to collect her post, turning herself into a man in the same way that Leonore had done when assuming the identity of Fidelio.)
Peter Gülke’s comment that Schumann’s music is all about Clara4 applies with particular force to the Piano Fantasy in A Minor, which also contains allusions to Clara’s Soirées musicales op. 6 and to her Romance op. 11, no. 2, as well as to the Grande sonate op. 3 by Ludwig Schuncke, a composer with whom Schumann was f
riendly until his premature death in 1834.5 And Schumann also plays with different layers of time: when the original form of the opening motif is “unveiled” in the Andante espressivo, it turns out that Schumann was working toward this moment as a pointer to the past—namely, as a reference to Beethoven and to a fateful period in the couple’s lives.
We do not need to know all of this in order to love Schumann’s Piano Fantasy, but there is no doubt that we can love it even more if we are aware of this background, for these little secrets are not extrinsic to the work but are so intricately interwoven with it that they represent a vital thread. As a composer of piano concertos, Schumann cannot be compared with Beethoven or Brahms, both of whom set out from a basic conceptual structure that imposes a sense of order on the individual musical ideas. Rather, Schumann shares with other romantic artists the belief that a work’s raw material is too impoverished to allow him to achieve his aim, which is to present his listener with a notion of the transcendental. Against this background romantic artists were constantly reflecting on ways of transcending both material reality and their own temporality in an attempt to reach beyond themselves.6
But this will work only if the artist reflects on his or her own existence and seeks to channel the narrative flow along lines that are based on that life. To Beethoven and Brahms, this would have seemed hubristic. For them, the essence of a piano concerto was to be found in the interplay between orchestra and soloist, the former representing the “public” sphere, the latter its “private” equivalent. Together they constitute an example of social order. Schumann subverts this idea, for his thinking is entirely grounded in the piano, which incorporates the orchestra to the extent that it results in a single body of sound—his body of sound. In doing so he was following a course that he had already charted two years earlier in his concerto movement in D minor—albeit—to quote Claudia Macdonald—“in a very different guise.”7
If Liszt’s witticism is true when he claimed that Schumann had written a “concerto without a piano,” then this might be seen as a compliment. (Liszt was, of course, also alluding to Schumann’s Concert sans orchestre op. 14.) The resultant work is not a concerto for a keyboard virtuoso but one in which the omnipresent sound of the piano merges with that of the orchestra to create a single entity—it was in this sense that the composer hoped to merge with his interpreter, Clara, who even helped him in writing out the score.
The interpreter in question was not only an accomplished virtuoso but also a profoundly artistic woman, and so she was fully able to judge what her husband had produced after he had pondered the question at length and after a complex compositional process—and in every case he had discussed these matters with her. Only someone who is not only a feminist but also an artist can say what happiness she must have felt on seeing the finished work. It is a happiness she must have continued to feel on every subsequent occasion when she performed it.
At the time, critics praised the work for its “vigor and impassioned strength” and spoke of “interiority and truth of feeling.” The most famous of them, Eduard Hanslick, compared the A-flat major episode with a “little lake, as bright as a mirror, between dark rocks and trees.”8 Such images do not provide us with an explanation but are like a love letter sent to the work in question. And what is there that is more beautiful than a love letter? The more infrequently we write them in real life, the more willingly we address them to music.
Lithograph of Schumann, after a portrait painted by the distinguished portraitist Eduard Kaiser in Vienna in January 1847, during a visit to the city by the composer and his wife. “During the morning sittings for Kaiser,” we read in their housekeeping book for January 13, 1847. In the event, it was not until some ten years later that lithographs were prepared from his portrait at the request of the Viennese art dealer Friedrich Paterno. Conversely, a double portrait of Schumann and Clara that was also painted by Kaiser in 1847 appeared on the market in the form of a lithograph later that same year. (Photograph courtesy of the Robert Schumann Museum, Zwickau.)
CHAPTER 8
Schumann as a Public Figure in the Years before the March Revolution of 1848
What one would like to call Schumann’s secret idea—namely, the desire to permeate classical forms with romanticism or, if one prefers, to capture the spirit of romanticism within a classical circle.
Franz Liszt in his article “Robert Schumann” for the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, 18551
Within the framework of his own aesthetic outlook, Liszt’s comment on Schumann was meant to be more skeptical than it sounds when quoted out of context. However well disposed he may have been toward him as a person, he doubted if, of all his contemporaries, Schumann was the one who would be capable of squaring the circle, as it were. Instead, he preferred to privilege his own symphonic poems and Wagner’s music dramas, placing them at the top of his agenda. For him, there was ultimately only one question: who was the worthy successor of the “classical” Beethoven, the giant forever looking over his successors’ shoulders? Was it the champions of “absolute” music or the New Germans who banked on the clarity of extra-musical programs or on the Wagnerian total artwork?
Both “parties”—and the term is entirely legitimate from the 1850s onward—could adduce valid arguments of their own. There was a Beethoven who turned the symphony’s traditional four-movement form into the yardstick by which everything else was measured and who was unimpressed by the question of whether it was possible to tell a credible story within the strait-jacket of this four-movement form. This Beethoven not only set store by the structural force that lay within a symphony’s four different types of movement but, more generally, he believed that the “meaning” of a work was revealed above all by the immanent motific and thematic processes that the composer set in motion and guided through the work. More than any other composer, it was Brahms who was heir to this particular Beethoven—no matter what scruples he may have felt at assuming that role.
By contrast, the “New German” party celebrated Beethoven as an artist who traded in ideas and whose symphonies and piano sonatas invariably revealed that music not only consists of what Hanslick termed “forms animated by musical sounds” but conveyed emotions, moods, and ethical attitudes that could assume highly concrete forms, notably in the case of Prometheus/Napoleon in the Eroica, the question of “fate” in the Fifth, and the “Awakening of Feelings of Joy on Arriving in the Countryside” in the Pastoral Symphony. With his final symphony—the Ninth—Beethoven, or so the New Germans triumphantly declared, argued that ideas previously discernible only indirectly in music could now be declaimed with greater clarity. It was no longer sufficient to revel in “joy” in purely orchestral sounds, no longer enough for all men to become brothers against the background of those sounds. No, the word alone could offer total clarity.
Liszt and Wagner were determined that even if they had to fight their battles independently, they would ultimately triumph together and fall heir to Beethoven’s mantle. Liszt used words to sketch out “programs” for symphonic poems such as Mazeppa and Prometheus, but after his initial successes he encountered difficulties in this field, and his heroic poems failed to recreate the impression of the epic songs on which they were modeled. Wagner was more successful in this regard. By banking on an ancient theatrical tradition he created the total artwork in which the principal medium was music, with its immediate appeal to the emotions, while the libretto—or “poem,” as Wagner liked to call it—carried the action forward and ensured that the myth acquired a visual form onstage.
And it is myth that is the keyword in terms of the factional conflict between the two parties—a conflict that was political in the wider sense of the term. The question was no longer who was composing the more beautiful music but who had the better concept for positioning music within society. Writing in the wake of Kant and Schiller, the adherents of the theory of “absolute” music, who—at the risk of oversimplification—may be placed in the conservative camp, drew a distincti
on between the “realm of necessity” and the “realm of freedom.” Whereas the material and, specifically, the economic constraints that obtained in the “realm of necessity” could be dismantled only piecemeal at best, art could present the world with a “realm of freedom” in which people could do as they liked—assuming that art demanded no influence on the “realm of necessity.”
But it was precisely this influence that the members of the progressive “New German school” demanded for themselves. Since his youth, Liszt had been a Saint-Simonian and a social revolutionary whose virtuosic piano piece Lyon commemorated an uprising by that city’s silk weavers in 1831, a revolt that had had to be put down by twenty thousand government soldiers. Although his symphonic poems were written almost twenty years later in neoclassical Weimar, they are no less politically engaged. Liszt was even willing to pay the price of being the lesser composer if in the process he was able to proclaim ideas of humanity, dignity, and heroism that he was determined should not remain in the “realm of freedom” but should prepare for a revolution in the “realm of necessity.”
It is no wonder, then, that Liszt provided shelter for Wagner when the latter fled to Weimar after his active involvement in the failed revolution in Dresden in May 1849. By that date only a fraction of the libretto of the Ring had been completed, but Liszt nevertheless must have suspected what was at stake for his future son-in-law: Wagner was throwing down a tremendous challenge to the ruling classes, which he still needed to implement his ideas: “Not like this,” he hurled in their faces. When money and power were all that counted, then society was doomed to perish.
