Robert Schumann: The Life and Work of a Romantic Composer

by Martin Geck

  This was a ray of light in the darkness surrounding the arguments over the post of music director, arguments that were eating away at Schumann’s self-esteem. It was not that he felt that he had burned himself out as a composer or that he could already foresee his own premature end, but there were times when he doubted whether there was any point to what he was doing: he missed his comrades from Leipzig—in other words, the members of the League of David. But now a new community of artists was opening its arms to him and telling him that his work was not in vain but that there were young people able to carry forth his message into the world. This group of artists, which had been summoned into existence in so wondrous a way, included not only Schumann, Clara, and Brahms but now also the young Joseph Joachim and the twenty-five-year-old Albert Dietrich, who was then living in Düsseldorf as Schumann’s pupil.

  In the middle of October Joachim announced that he would be coming from Hanover to visit them, prompting the three composers in Düsseldorf to surprise him with a sonata for violin and piano based on the three notes F–A–E, the initials of Joachim’s motto in life, Frei, aber einsam (free but solitary). Schumann wrote the second and fourth movements, Dietrich the opening movement, and Brahms the Scherzo, albeit without reference to the motto, which Brahms was later to appropriate in the form Einsam, aber frei (solitary but free). The joint piece was intended to demonstrate that the old Schumannesque spirit was still alive and well: the poetic symbol guaranteed that the work as a whole would have a deeper meaning, one that its compositional structure on its own was unable to provide.

  Brahms had been in Düsseldorf for less than two weeks when Schumann wrote his famous essay “New Paths” and published it overnight in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, even though he had not been actively involved with the paper for the last ten years. He spoke of the fulfillment of his Messianic hopes of a man who was “fated to give expression to the times in the highest and most ideal manner.”30

  It would be wrong to dismiss the hymnlike tone of this article as mawkish sentimentality on the part of a man bruised and battered by fate, for the essay, which appeared on the paper’s front page, was intended to create a splash that would provoke tremors among initiates. True, Franz Brendel, who was now the paper’s editor and who had in the meantime switched his allegiance from Schumann to Wagner and Liszt, unceremoniously dismissed his predecessor’s aesthetic credo as representing an “outdated standpoint,”31 but he was unwilling to deny Schumann a platform. There is a certain irony, then, to the fact that in a journal that was awaiting a Messiah by the name of Wagner and that was biding its time by opening its columns to Liszt’s ideas on educating the masses, Schumann should speak of hopes very different from those of its editor. Schumann, after all, was hoping for “a secret alliance of kindred spirits” that would perpetuate a type of music that was not “absolute” in the spirit of a dogmatic writer like Hanslick but “poetic” in the sense understood by Bach and Beethoven and by their spiritual successors, Kreisler, Florestan, and Eusebius.

  Intermezzo VIII

  The Road to Freedom

  Friedrich Nietzsche was not only musically literate, he could also write eloquently on the subject of music. He praised Beethoven for “the invention of the grand form for the expression of passion” and criticized Beethoven’s successors for having failed in their attempt to imitate their model:

  That is why the symphony after Beethoven is such a strangely confused affair, especially when in its individual parts it still stammers the language of Beethovenian pathos. The means are not appropriate to the objective, and the objective as a whole is not at all clear to the listener because it was never clear to the composer either.1

  By demanding a clarity that cannot exist in purely instrumental music, Nietzsche was hoping to break a lance for the Wagnerian musical drama, but at the same time he found the Achilles heel of the post-Beethovenian symphony—for however much composers may have wanted to equal their great model in matters of ethos and pathos they had signally failed to produce any works of comparably concentrated power.

  Beethoven’s symphonies are like major public buildings: imposing but without any false monumentality, well constructed but elastic, presenting us with an overall structure but evincing loving detail. Quite how Beethoven achieved this remains his secret—in spite of considerable advances in professional musical analysis. How, for example, does such an approach explain the compelling logic of the sequence of ideas in the Allegretto of the Seventh Symphony? To all appearances, this is a harmless set of variations. But which other composer would have succeeded within this straightforward form in conveying what one commentator has called the “sense of a mounting development, the impression of a building rising ever higher”?2 And which other composer would have managed the transition from measured steps to hymnlike singing so that listeners do not know what is happening to them and yet have the feeling that what is happening is nonetheless inevitable?

  Not even Mendelssohn and Schumann—the leading representatives of the generation after Beethoven and Schubert in the field of the German symphony—could do this. Although they had poetic ideas, rousing mottos, and the will to create Nietzsche’s “grand form for the expression of passion,” they found it hard to reconcile these two elements. Beginning with his Spring Symphony, Schumann’s symphonies offer a cornucopia of memorable motifs and beautiful melodies that fill the listener with very real pleasure each time that they appear, but, formally speaking, we still ask ourselves: why this particular transition? Why this element in the development section? And where is the consistent attempt to guide the listener’s expectations?

  The objection that it is wrong to judge Schumann by Beethovenian standards and that formal rigor should not be used as a criterion by which to assess the excellence of romantic music is valid to only a limited degree, simply because as a symphonist Schumann applied Beethovenian criteria to himself. Indeed, there are times when even more than his model he strove on the one hand to unify the thematic material and on the other to achieve multilayered textures. There are also many hidden relationships and cross-references that invest his symphonies with the kind of musical poetry that permeates almost every one of his works.

  In short, the problem is not that these works lack complexity but that they lack straightforwardness. In view of the fact that their message is sometimes excessively coded, Schumann himself seems to have felt himself a stranger within own symphonic structures. As we have already noted, he was assailed by self-doubts on completing his Third Symphony and wondered if “anyone would like it,” suggesting that he was then struggling to come to terms with his own introvert neoclassicism.

  In terms of the “grand form for the expression of passion,” the litmus test for any composer came above all in the final movement of his symphonies. Could he finally harvest the fruits of his labors? Had he worked sufficiently hard in the previous movements to be able to bring in a harvest at all? This was the central problem of idealistic music aesthetics—one that in the generation before Schumann had been handled by Beethoven on the very highest level. In their very different ways, Beethoven’s first eight symphonies all provide an answer to the question of how the final movement can provide the most compelling distillation of all that has gone before it. Only in the final movement of the Ninth did he then capitulate in the face of his own demands. Here it is impossible for musical logic alone to give meaning to that movement. Rather, the composer requires a deus ex machina in the guise of Schiller’s “Ode to Joy.”

  The autograph score of the opening bars of the first movement of Schumann’s Third Symphony in E-flat Major (Rhenish) op. 97 (1850). (Courtesy of the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin—Staatsbibliothek. Photograph: bpk, Berlin/Art Resource, NY.)

  Wagner regarded the Ninth Symphony’s solution to the problem posed by the final movement as a challenge: from then on musical ideas would have to be expressed not through the medium of the symphony but through that of the musical drama. Schumann’s various solution
s to the problem of the symphonic finale, conversely, appeal to the “classical” Beethoven of the first eight symphonies. But with what results! In the final movement of the Symphony in C Major, it is not one of Schumann’s motifs that triumphs but one taken over from Beethoven in a spirit of reverence. As we observed in an earlier chapter, when we quoted Peter Gülke on the subject, this is an astonishing example of a composer breaking free from the rules.

  But it was in his final symphony, the Rhenish, that Schumann achieved an even more amazing, not to say pioneering, feat of breaking free from these rules. The opening of the first movement in the autograph score is reproduced here. Over the symphony as a whole it is no longer Beethoven who hovers as a superego but Schubert, who functions as a benevolent spirit with his Symphony in C Major (Great). Without being intimidated by him, Schumann celebrates in this work the “novelistic character” that reminded him of Vienna—“Vienna with its spire of St. Stephen’s Cathedral, its beautiful women, its public splendor, and the way in which it is girded by the Danube as if with countless ribbons, stretching out into the blossoming plain that gradually rises to ever greater heights.”3

  Schumann could not have written in such a relaxed way about one of Beethoven’s symphonies. But he was willing to take this risk in the case of Schubert, and he chose the C Major Symphony as the model for his Rhenish. When he did so a good ten years after his first encounter with it, it was not in the spirit of a stylistic copy. Rather, Schubert’s music was like one of Jean Paul’s novels in that its function was to open up new worlds to his imagination.

  Schumann did not depart from his usual method of interweaving themes and motifs or of pointing up their relationships and of using assonance as a compositional device.4 But all of this remains in the background and at least for the unprejudiced listener plays no part in the listening process, since such listeners perceive the symphony above all as a sequence of events which, viewed from a Beethovenian standpoint, are juxtaposed in an almost insolent manner. It is not the architectural form but the narrative element that occupies the forefront of the listener’s attention.

  As a result, an early review of the symphony—presumably based on hints handed out by Schumann’s close circle of friends—speaks of a work in which “a scene from Rhineland life unfolds with cheery joviality,” while the second movement recalls “beautiful boat rides between grape-green hills and the grape pickers’ welcoming celebrations.” In the third movement, the “tone poet leans his head in thought against the old castle window” before “the subtle sounds of natural horns” recall him to the present.5

  This is admirably in tune with Schumann’s rapturous description of Schubert’s symphony, and it also reflects the impression that is left on listeners. It is no accident that for many years the main themes of the first two movements were used as signature tunes for two programs broadcast by the former North-West German Radio, their characteristic local color designed to drum up trade for the programs in question. Of course, the Rhenish Symphony and a “Rhineland character” are not the same thing, but it is nonetheless true that Schumann’s music has a quality that makes the “re-creative” listener think that such attributions are meaningful.

  From the fourth movement of the Rhenish Symphony onward, Schumann adopts a concept that on a formal and narrative level differs in fundamental ways from the one that Schubert had used. Instead of steering toward the final movement, he interpolates a movement that introduces what in the context of traditional four-movement form can only be described as an irregularity. In the printed score this movement is headed “Feierlich” (solemn), but at the first performance it was marked “In the character of the accompaniment to a solemn ceremony.”6 Schumann’s early biographers claim that the composer was inspired by the elevation of Archbishop Johannes von Geissel to the rank of cardinal in Cologne Cathedral.

  But details such as these do not matter. Rather, what concerns us is the novelty of the composer’s narrative strategy, which no longer allows him to follow up a third movement occupying the place of a Scherzo with a finale—whether he was motivated by a conscious awareness of the tradition in which he was working or by mere naïveté is irrelevant here. Instead, this final movement is “staged” in an extremely reflective way. In his fourth movement, Schumann not only departs from the largely jovial character of the three preceding movements, he also changes the narrative level in not insubstantial ways: much as E. T. A. Hoffmann and Jean Paul do in their novels, he spends a whole chapter directing his gaze at the past and in doing so enters a world of mystical darkness that fills him—and us—with awe and apprehension. From a musical point of view, Schumann uses layers of fourths to erect the monumental façade of a gloomy building inside which may be heard the sounds of individual anguish inspired by Bach’s chromatic counterpoint. In this context, R. Larry Todd has drawn attention to the C-sharp Minor Fugue from part 1 of The Well-Tempered Clavier.7

  There is no compelling logic to all this. Rather, it is based on narrative calculation: before “everyone runs outside,” to quote from the aforementioned critic’s account of the final movement,8 listeners are led inside a locked and darkened room. And before they can abandon themselves to the cheerful present, of which the first three movements have already given them a taste, they are first confronted by the splendor but also by the sorrows of the past.

  Only then may we cheerfully cast aside all unwanted baggage and strike out on the road to freedom once and for all. But this brings us back to the problem of the idea underpinning the final movement, a problem that Schumann proceeds to solve in an altogether virtuosic way. In the final movement of the Rhenish Symphony he may play with the device of bringing together thematic threads that he has woven in the previous movements, but at the same time he has glimpsed an alternative solution, a third way between a finale that promises grand solutions to all the problems previously raised and a finale that regards itself as a simple envoi heedless of all that has gone before it.

  This third solution is the road to freedom, and it suggested itself to Schumann because it leads out of the darkness and oppressive confines of the locked space. The fact that he found this exit at all is in itself sufficient grounds for celebration—nothing more is needed to legitimize the final movement. As listeners we may enjoy our present lives—thus runs the symphony’s message.

  There are good reasons the final movement begins with the performance marking “Dolce” (sweetly): the less bombast a conductor brings to it, the more he or she will be able to demonstrate to an audience the ease with which Schumann can promulgate a festive atmosphere. There are times when we may even be reminded of a fairground, notably in the context of the spirited trumpet signal that repeatedly asserts itself from bar 60 onward or the witty way in which the basses pluck up courage in bars 244–46 before launching into the final jubilation in bar 255.

  In spite of these popular elements, the movement is far from wholly innocent in character. Toward the end of what we may perhaps be permitted to call its development section, for example, Schumann produces a veritable stroke of genius. Starting in bar 130, the horns suddenly expound a jubilant fanfare motif in B major. Following a bold harmonic shift, this motif is then transposed to B-flat major and from there it modulates to the home key of E-flat major. This in itself is enough to create the effect of a sophisticated compositional triumph on the completion of a particularly difficult feat. And yet the punch line is still to come. As the consequent phrase of the fanfare motif, Schumann conjures up the main theme of the final movement and introduces a kind of recapitulation at a totally unexpected point in the musical argument. Two armies that had previously operated on their own close ranks in a striking manner in order to march together in joint formation toward the hymnlike closing celebrations. For me, this passage always has a feeling of déjà vu to it in the sense that although I know what to expect, I still feel a thrill of excitement when that moment finally arrives.

  Peter Gülke has called the Rhenish Symphony a “solitary work.”
9 His aim is not to deny the work’s communicative qualities, which audiences have always been able to appreciate. Rather, his position is that of a historian aware that between 1824 and 1876—the dates of the first performances of Beethoven’s Ninth and Brahms’s First—there was no significant symphony that was not more emphatic in its rejection not only of traditional four-movement form but also of obvious links between its movements,10 to say nothing of idealistic weight and German interiority. “Folk-like elements had to prevail,” Schumann told Wasielewski.11 And this is also the message of the Rhenish Symphony. If we may ignore the specific function of the fourth movement, the work is sparing in its use of musical metaphysics and of pointers to ideas that might lie hidden behind the actual sound of the music. And it also eschews Nietzsche’s demand for a “grand form for the expression of passion” in favor of a more instantly accessible narrativity. While professing his faith in the “grand symphony,” Schumann manages to make do without grand gestures and problematical promises of happiness. At least within the German tradition, this is practically unique.

  The only bust of Schumann to be made during his lifetime is this plaster bust by the Düsseldorf sculptor Johann Peter Götting. An entry in the Schumanns’ housekeeping book for March 2, 1852, reads simply, “Sitting for a sculptor” (Tagebücher 3/2:587). The original—now in the Schumann Museum in Zwickau—is almost life-size but has been reproduced in many smaller formats. (Photograph courtesy of the Heinrich Heine Institute of the Regional Capital of Düsseldorf.)

  CHAPTER 11

  The Late Works

  The task of formulating a new aesthetic is like trying to square the circle. There is always an infinite gap between theory and practice, between the rule and its example, and between laws and freedom. But perhaps this gap is more important than the whole.