by Martin Geck
“Prophets to the right and prophets to the left, the child of the world in the middle”—Goethe’s lines from 1774 could well be applied to the Schumann of the 1840s. Goethe certainly did not want to present himself as a nonbeliever when describing himself in this way, and it would be equally wrong of us to use this characterization to deny Schumann all his ideals. Even so, these ideals were not set in stone. The hypothetical alternatives of “art must remain what it always was” and “art must achieve something completely different” could be offset with a third artistic credo: “the artist must remain true to himself.”
How could Schumann hope to achieve this aim when in 1841 he suddenly switched from writing piano pieces and songs to symphonic works, a switch from works that were felt to be highly “subjective” to others which were committed to “objectivity” and universal intelligibility not least because they were intended to be performed in public? Critics were often only half-hearted in their praise, since they felt that he had failed to heed their demand that “the composer’s self must assume a form of expression in which others can instantly recognize their own selves.”2 But Schumann did not care to play off the subjective against the objective; for him, all genres must be permeated by a musical poetry for which the composer took personal responsibility—even at the risk of not being universally understood.
The significance of this is immediately clear from Schumann’s First Symphony, in which he sensibly took his cue neither from the formal rigor of a Beethoven symphony nor from the formal liberties of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique. Instead, his guardian angel ensured that he was introduced just in time to Schubert’s Great C Major Symphony, in which he found all that he needed. First and foremost he discovered a poetic motto that placed its seal on the symphony as a whole; that, at least, is how Schumann interpreted the horn call with which Schubert had launched his own symphony. And in that spirit he refashioned it as his own motto and did so in such a way that—as we have noted—it can be sung to the words “Im Tale blüht der Frühling auf.” But Schumann also learned from Schubert’s ingenious ability to write in a manner that was both formally fixed and novelistically free. Finally, he allowed himself to be inspired by Schubert’s musical poetry: “Here there is not only a masterful musical technique but also life in every fiber, the most subtly shaded colors, significance everywhere, the keenest expression on points of detail, and the whole work imbued with a romanticism familiar from many other works by Schubert.”3
Even though Schumann had described himself in his youth as a “brave epigone,”4 it seems inappropriate to judge his First Symphony in B-flat Major by the standards of Schubert’s C Major Symphony. Nonetheless, the work was such a success with its early audiences that between 1841 and 1852 he was able to record no fewer than forty-three performances on the front endpaper of his autograph copy of the score. Even so, there is an evident sense of effort in his handling of large-scale form that can be discerned behind the ease with which he explores the theme of spring. This was bound up, of course, with the symphonic situation at this time—we find much the same in Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony, a work which in spite of its various revisions its composer refused to publish.
Fired by the success of his First Symphony, Schumann followed it up with three further large-scale orchestral works between April and September 1841—an astonishingly short space of time. These were his Overture, Scherzo, and Finale op. 52; the A Minor Piano Fantasy described in detail in Intermezzo V; and a second symphony which, following a series of revisions, became the Fourth Symphony in D Minor op. 120. In the case of the op. 52, writers have found it difficult to resist the temptation to indulge in a note of mockery by quoting a passage from Schumann’s Neue Zeitschrift of July 1839:
For the most part the newer symphonies have sunk to the level of overtures, especially their opening movements; the slow movements are there only because they cannot be allowed to go missing; the scherzos are scherzos in name alone; and the final movements have no idea what the earlier ones contained.5
Certainly, the Overture, Scherzo, and Finale leaves an ambivalent impression, even though Schumann had originally planned it as a relatively lightweight “sinfonietta.” The poetic idea implied by the opening motto is not carried through; and the orchestral fireworks set off especially in the Finale remain conventional. Schumann himself was, of course, satisfied and so it was with a correspondingly positive feeling that he moved on to one of the high points of his career as a composer: the Fantasy in A Minor. After that there was to be another major symphony, and in order to avoid the impression of randomness that the sequence of movements of the Sinfonietta op. 52 might have left, he fell back on a device that was then becoming fashionable and allowed the movements to pass into each other without a break. In the opening movement, moreover, he dispensed with a recapitulation, ensuring that the transition to the second movement could be as informal as possible. The result is a work that can legitimately be described as a symphonic fantasy, a description that Schumann in fact envisaged for the revised version, even though this version is less deserving of such an appellation. True, both versions contain long sections of a wildly impassioned or melancholy minor-key character that provide a sense of unity sufficient to suggest associations with the still to be invented genre of the symphonic poem. It is interesting that in 1841 listeners were clearly overtaxed by the work’s apparently improvisatory features, whereas the situation had changed completely within only ten years, when the conservative critic Ludwig Bischoff praised the revised version of the D Minor Symphony as a piece whose formal cohesion allowed it to stand out to its own advantage from what he called the “bunglings” of the current New German school of composers such as Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner.
Even for those of us with a good understanding of the historical situation, it is often difficult to say why a particular work should go down well with its audiences at a certain point in time, while another work fails to find favor. Why, for example, was the Gewandhaus concert on December 6, 1841, when the Sinfonietta op. 52 and the D Minor Symphony both received their first performances, no more than a limited success? Perhaps the concert was simply poorly planned. To the Schumanns’ delight, Liszt had declared his willingness to appear onstage with Clara at the end of the evening and play works for two pianos, but their joint appearance seems to have eclipsed the rest of the program.
Negotiations with the publishing house Breitkopf & Härtel likewise came to nothing, and so for now Schumann locked away the D Minor Symphony and turned to a field that he had not previously tilled: chamber music. At the aforementioned “quartet mornings” that took place at his home in the late 1830s, the concertmaster Ferdinand David recalled that he generally “sat in the furthest corner of the room, saying little but exuding the happiest of moods” and afterward offering his guests glasses of champagne.6 By now Schumann had not only assimilated the quartets of his avowed models, Beethoven and Mendelssohn, he had also studied in detail those of Haydn and Mozart. The three String Quartets op. 41 can certainly stand comparison with those of their dedicatee, Mendelssohn.
Some years earlier Schumann had reviewed a chamber work by George Onslow in his Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, in the course of which he noted that “a true quartet is one in which everyone has something to say—it is an often genuinely beautiful, often strangely and unclearly convoluted conversation between four people, where the spinning out of the threads” creates an attractive impression.7 In writing this, Schumann was consciously introducing a note of fantasy to Goethe’s famous definition of the string quartet as a conversation between four intelligent people—and this was the direction that Schumann himself now took. His quartets are arguably more exciting than the contemporary works by Mendelssohn, but they are also less accessible and less memorable. Or, rather, they do not necessarily make sense at an initial hearing, since the four voices are regularly treated as obbligato instruments. It comes as no surprise, therefore, to learn that decades later Theodor Billroth—a leading physicia
n, friend of Brahms, and passionate recitalist—wrote in his book Who Is Musical? that “in my enthusiasm I was happy to go along with Mendelssohn and Chopin, because the musical training that I had acquired until then was sufficient; but for Schumann and Brahms I needed guides.”8
In a brilliant study of the opening movement of the String Quartet op. 41, no. 3, Peter Gülke has spoken of the “ingenious solutions” forced on the composer by his thoughtless choice of themes, and he accuses Schumann of “increasingly intense impatience” whenever he fails to “concentrate on formalities” and acts in opposition to “his picture of what he suspects as being neoclassical.”9 Of course, contemporary audiences were attracted less to Schumann’s string quartets than to two chamber works written with Clara in mind: the Piano Quartet op. 47 and, above all, the Piano Quintet op. 44. The opening movement of this last-named work begins with an Allegro brillante as energetic as the double fugue at the end of its final movement, which combines this movement’s main idea with the opening movement’s first subject, while additionally quoting an episode from the slow movement. Marked “In modo d’una marcia,” this dark-toned slow movement is the heart of the Piano Quintet (and will be discussed in greater detail in Intermezzo VI).
But it was with a large-scale vocal work that Schumann enjoyed his greatest public success in the 1840s, Paradise and the Peri. He refused to describe it as an oratorio, preferring to ascribe it to a “new genre,”10 and insisting that it was intended “not for the oratory but for cheerful souls.”11 On completing the work in June 1843, he wrote to his friend Johann Verhulst: “A piece like this involves a good deal of work—it’s really only then that you learn what it means to write more such works—like Mozart, for example, writing eight operas in such a short space of time.” And again: “The story of the peri [. . .] comes from Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh and might almost have been written for music. The idea underlying the work as a whole is so poetic and so pure that it really inspired me.”12
In spite of his admiration for Bach’s Passions and Mendelssohn’s St. Paul, Schumann had no desire to write a traditional ecclesiastical work, still less a Christian piece in the narrower sense of that term. Instead, he set out to produce something more original combining the religious traditions of three different culture groups, Indian, Egyptian, and Muhammadan, in a single coherent action centered around the figure of the peri, while at the same time hinting at Christian symbols. The peri is a half-human, half-celestial figure and can enter Paradise only by offering a gift that Heaven finds pleasing. The peri’s first two sorties take her halfway around the world. She returns from the first with the blood of a young hero and from the second with the sighs of a virgin who sacrificed her life for her bridegroom. But Heaven acknowledges only the tears of remorse shed by a man who, laden with sin, sets eyes on a pure child.
In alighting on the figure of the peri, Schumann chose well. The subject was so popular at this time that it could reckon on the interest of the choral societies that decided the fate of such works. But the subject was also supremely well suited to Schumann himself, a point noted by an anonymous contemporary critic, who claimed that the composer’s decision to tackle it was the fruit of “acute self-awareness and understanding of his own character and strengths.”13
As we observed at the start of the present study, the phrenologist Richard Noel was struck by a number of Schumann’s characteristics at more or less this time: a great love of the truth, great honesty, great benevolence, emotionality through and through, a genuine appreciation of formal structures, and modesty. We do not need to invest this characterization with an undue degree of mystique to see that it was admirably suited to a composer who was enthusiastic about the peri as a subject. Schumann did not choose a hero, a prophet or a saint, whether male or female, nor did he select a creature whose only function was to be sacrificed. Instead, he opted for a character who, humble to the core, accepts personal responsibility for her own salvation and finds Paradise through her encounter with love, kindness, devotion, and repentance.
Of course, Schumann was not the only artist at this time to find spiritual inspiration in legend and fairytale. But for an artist who invariably felt guilty through no fault of his own, this road to redemption must have seemed particularly inviting. This also explains why Schumann initially felt remote from Tannhäuser, on which Wagner was working at a time when Schumann was putting the finishing touches to Paradise and the Peri. In Wagner’s case, a not-dissimilar subject is treated in a far more graphic manner; from a compositional point of view, there was something distinctly “materialistic” about Wagner’s treatment of his subject, an approach that contemporaries regarded with praise or censure depending on their point of view.
Schumann’s work begins with the peri motif, which wafts down from Heaven before combining with a passage of gentle counterpoint and finally leads directly into the opening scene. This is both more organic and more subtle in its impact than Wagner’s approach in his Tannhäuser overture, which operates on the level of powerful stimulants and stark contrasts, to say nothing of the final apotheosis, which tests the patience of even the most committed Wagnerian, for here Wagner combines a much expanded fortissimo statement of the motif associated with divine clemency with endlessly descending scales of sixteenth notes that Wagner himself said expressed “the seething and swelling of every pulse of life in a chorus of redemption.”14
Schumann’s overture to Paradise and the Peri even emerges with credit from a comparison, not with Tannhäuser, but with Mendelssohn’s St. Paul, a popular, oft-performed oratorio at this period. In the course of its overture the chorale Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme is presented in a magnificent orchestral garb as a symbol of the unshakable Protestant faith. So great is the composer’s contrapuntal artistry, moreover, that it is impossible to overlook the affinities between Bach and his later imitator.
With regard to the finished works, too, it is gratifying that there is an alternative to Tannhäuser on the one hand and to St. Paul on the other. It was an alternative that in the eyes of contemporary critics not only laid the foundations for a “new genre” located midway between sacred oratorio and opera,15 but also was capable of lending distinctive new features to opera. On a formal level this novelty consists in an increasing tendency to move in the direction of through-composition, a trend scarcely less advanced in Paradise and the Peri than it was to be only a few years later in Schumann’s own opera Genoveva and Wagner’s Lohengrin. Aesthetically speaking, there is also something novel about the idea of a unified “tone,” which—borrowing a term from one of the performance markings in the Piano Fantasy op. 17—we could call a “legendary tone.” Such a tone embraces a whole range of color from sheer delight to mystic darkness, while avoiding triumphalist screams and extended portrayals of horror. In spite of its historically charged images, touching strophic songs, and vivid individual scenes, Paradise and the Peri gives the impression of a work in which action and music eschew excessive climaxes and contrasts as they move toward the peri’s apotheosis at the words, “My work is done.”
It is almost certainly no accident that in departing from his source, Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh, Schumann chose not to include the name of a person in first position in his title, but preferred to describe a state—namely, the state that mankind has forfeited and to which we long to return with every fiber of our being. This is also one of the reasons he succeeds in avoiding the shows of strength traditional in oratorios and operas in the form of emotionally charged arias, agitated ensembles, monumental choral fugues, and melodramatic finales.
Schumann’s contemporaries were able to appreciate this quality—after all, there were enough works at this time that relied on drama and strident colors to achieve their impact. Here one thinks of Friedrich Schneider’s oratorio Das Weltgericht and Meyerbeer’s opera Les Huguenots, for example. If today’s listeners are inclined to mock the long stretches of parched arioso rather than admire the work’s lyrical subtleties, they have every right to do
so, and yet the world would be a poorer place without this bold and innovative work in the field of symphonic vocal music.
In order to assess two works that are associated with Schumann’s public persona and which, dating from the period before March 1848, belong in the present chapter, I need to anticipate his time in Dresden. The first is the Piano Concerto in A Minor op. 54 that Schumann completed in the summer of 1845, when he added a second and a third movement to the Piano Fantasy of 1841 discussed in Intermezzo V. Although some years were to pass before this became one of the most popular piano concertos in the classical repertory, it met with a positive response from the outset, Schumann having succeeded in gaining acceptance among increasingly neoclassically minded music critics with a work that abandons none of the romanticism of the fantasy on which it was based but retains its thematic material even in the movements that were added later.
Less unequivocal was the contemporary reaction to the C Major Symphony op. 61 that Mendelssohn introduced to his Gewandhaus audiences in November 1846. Within a year Mendelssohn was dead, and so for a brief period Schumann himself came to represent German musical culture in the spirit of the older classicism—this, at least, is how he was viewed in the current debate on musical aesthetics. But such an honor brings with it its own burden of responsibilities, begging the question whether Schumann could assume this new function with this particular piece. In Leipzig’s two leading music journals, the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung and the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, Alfred Dörffel and Eduard Krüger both struck a charitable note when claiming that Schumann had survived his “fermentation process” and for the most part managed to ensure that the “objective and subjective elements”—in other words, the powers of representation and imagination—were now “in the right relationship from a neoclassical standpoint.”16
