Robert Schumann grew up with two forces dominating his life: a manic creativity that from his early years manifested in poems, plays, novels, and music; and the threat of madness that harried him throughout his life until it finally claimed him. He stands as one of the defining figures of the romantic age, an era which gave rise to his creative voice, and which in turn he marked with his own personality as composer and critic. Even his madness was part of the atmosphere of his time, and his fragmented personality was woven indelibly into his work.
Schumann was the son of a bookseller and writer in Zwickau. He began playing piano at six and composing soon after. Besides music he was fervid about literature and imbibed literary romanticism directly from the sources. He was attached above all to the wild fictions of Jean Paul, with his doppelgängers and faked suicides, and to the fantasist E. T. A. Hoffmann.
After the death of his father he entered law school at his mother’s insistence, but spent his time there either at the piano, composing, or carousing. Finally his mother gave him permission to leave school and study piano with the celebrated teacher Friedrich Wieck, whose most famous pupil was his eight-year-old daughter Clara, a keyboard prodigy. Schumann hoped Wieck would lead him to a career as a piano virtuoso, but that dream was ended by a hand injury. Instead, Wieck led him to Clara.
Schumann turned to composing with a vengeance. In short order he produced some of the most brilliant piano works of his time, one of them the Jean Paul–inspired Papillons (Butterflies), finished in 1831. It is startling to realize that this revolutionary collection of boisterous miniatures appeared only four years after Beethoven died, yet is utterly distinctive in voice.
Part of Schumann’s innovative pianistic style had to do with the instrument itself, which had evolved far from the harpsichordish instruments of Beethoven’s youth. Pianos were now more robust and resonant, offering new kinds of figuration and pedal effects that Schumann and his contemporary Chopin exploited in historic ways.
In that heady period came another force that rocked Schumann’s life: by the time Clara Wieck was sixteen, now a celebrated piano virtuoso, she and Robert had fallen desperately in love. Her father, outraged at the presumption of a penniless composer known to be a drinker and womanizer and generally unstable, did everything in his power to keep them apart. The couple resorted to secret notes and codes and anxious rendezvous that went on for years. From this point on, Clara would be an intimate part of Robert’s music as well as his life.
But everything in Schumann’s life went into his art. Most of his finest early works have evocative titles, with secret games and personal symbols imbedded in the notes. Carnaval, finished four years after Papillons, is a more extensive assemblage of short movements evoking the yearly costumed bacchanal on the streets. The movements range from grand to tender to wild gaiety, all of them singular in their handling of the piano and their harmonic voice—Schumann is one of those composers usually recognizable in seconds. Each segment has a title, ranging from “Pierrot” and “Arlequin,” the clowns of carnival season that precedes Lent, to “Chiarina,” a secret name for Clara. Holding the movement together is a cabala of four notes: A–S–C–H (in German parlance the notes A–E-flat–C–and B). In that order the letters form “Asch,” birthplace of an old girlfriend of Robert’s; they are contained in the German word Fasching (Carnival); and Sch are the first three letters of his name. Later, he turned the musical letters of Clara’s name into a theme: C–B–A–G-sharp–A. It became the leading motif of his Fourth Symphony.
Another echt-Schumann work is Kreisleriana, based on the half-mad poet-composer Johannes Kreisler invented by fantasist E. T. A. Hoffmann. The piece is a kind of portrait of madness, beginning with an explosion of energy like two pianos at once, then it sinks to a quiet lyrical interlude. The rest of the piece explores that bipolar temperament. The century romanticized madness and suicide, and Schumann was marked by both in his art and in his life.
Two of the movements of Carnaval are “Florestan” and “Eusebius.” These were names Schumann gave to his own conflicting alter-egos: brash, impulsive Florestan and quiet, introspective Eusebius. It was often in the guise of those characters that Schumann wrote criticism in a music journal he cofounded. These personas formed the basis of the imaginary “Davidsbund,” a little band of Davids fighting the Goliath of philistinism in music—shallow composers and empty virtuosos and the audiences who idolized them. (Here we see the beginnings of a divide between composers and audiences that would only grow throughout the century.) In his years as critic Schumann spread the word about a number of composers whom he deemed worthy, including Mendelssohn, Berlioz, and Chopin (in the Chopin article, Florestan bounds into the room crying, “Hats off, gentlemen: a genius!”).
After a long and mutually humiliating court battle with Friedrich Wieck, Robert and Clara finally married in 1840. They became one of the great creative teams of the age. Their love was hugely fulfilling, but it was no easy business: Clara was often pregnant (they had seven surviving offspring), and she had to deal with children and her performing career while still holding Robert together through his advancing afflictions. Few could have managed all that, but Clara was made of steel.
Schumann composed in a fury, very fast, with long fallow periods sometimes filled with mental breakdowns. To say that his way of working was manic is not a figure of speech; today he would probably be diagnosed as bipolar. Another symptom was a fanatical concentration on one medium at a time. In his “song year,” 1840, he wrote 138 lieder. With these songs Schumann stands alongside Schubert as a founder of the German lied tradition that lasted into the next century.
Many of the songs are joined into cycles telling a story or circling around a theme. To get acquainted with Schumann’s songs, perhaps start with two from Liederkreis (Song Cycle), Op. 39. “Mondnacht” (Night of the Moon), by Joseph von Eichendorff, is one of the quintessential romantic poems, a vision of a moonlit night that ends with the poet almost merging into the landscape: “as if my soul were flying home.” Schumann’s piano part sets the scene in soft drifting and twining lines. The always defining role of the piano in his songs is seen in a different way in “Auf einer Burg” (On a Hilltop), also by Eichendorff. It pictures an ancient stone knight in a ruined castle above the Rhine, watching a wedding party on the river; it ends with the stunning last line: “and the beautiful bride, who weeps.” Here Schumann with the simplest means paints a scene of refined weirdness—the weird and uncanny being high-romantic territory.
Dichterliebe (Poet’s Love), is one of the most beloved of song cycles, based on the wistfully and bitterly ironic poems of Heinrich Heine: “I’ll not complain!” is the refrain of one poem that is a litany of complaints. With his literary background Schumann had a particular sensitivity to Heine’s exquisite ambiguities. The first song, “In the beautiful month of May,” is from the piano’s first weaving lines a romantic landscape both interior and exterior. In “I hear a fluting and fiddling,” Schumann’s piano part paints a wedding ball and the singer watching from the side; it is his love’s wedding to somebody else.
After their marriage Clara pressed Robert to put aside piano miniatures and lieder and take up the big, traditional genres: symphony, opera, string quartet. Robert obeyed, the results were mixed. He was a brilliant miniaturist, but had a limited ability to shape large-scale forms in an organic way; still less did he possess an innate orchestral imagination. All the same, he produced some fine and much-loved major works.
The best known of his chamber music is the Piano Quintet in E-flat—more piano than quintet, which in Schumann’s case is a good thing. Its success has much to do with its string of yearning, surging themes with his signature poetic quality. The second movement is a haunting funeral march. The Piano Concerto in A Minor, written for Clara, is also full of lyrical beauties. It has long reigned as one of the most popular of all concertos. The piece has a universal quality, attaching itself to your own yearnings and sorrows as truly great music can do.
Schumann wrote four symphonies, all of them flawed, none entirely sure-handed with the orchestra, yet still often moving and powerful. In the end he brought a new kind of intimacy to the traditionally epic genre of symphony. He also helped establish the idea of “cyclic” instrumental works, in which the same themes are developed throughout a piece.
In 1853, in Düsseldorf where Schumann had faltered in a conducting job, a twenty-year-old music student named Johannes Brahms knocked on their door. After he had played them a few pieces and left, Schumann wrote in his journal: “Visit from Brahms (a genius).” Soon after, he published an article called “New Paths” that proclaimed this young unknown the coming messiah of German music. With that he placed a sword over Brahms’s head that remained for the rest of his life—but even if being a messiah was not his style, Brahms entirely lived up to the prophecy.
Schumann would not be around to see his prophecy fulfilled. By the time he and Clara met Brahms, Robert was becoming suicidal, beset by angelic and demonic choruses in his head, terrified he might hurt Clara or the children. Finally, in the middle of carnival festivities he made his way through the grotesque crowds of masked revelers and threw himself into the Rhine. He was pulled out, but at his own request committed to an asylum, where he died two and a half years later, in 1856. Clara was not allowed to see him until the end, when he could hardly speak and could only lick wine from her fingertips. It may have been syphilis contracted long before, or some other brain disorder on top of his bipolar personality.
Schumann’s music made its way into the world slowly, and in his lifetime he was never as celebrated as Clara. But by the latter half of the century he had been enshrined not only as an irreplaceable composer but as one of the central avatars of the romantic spirit, and no less a model of the romantic genius-hero, his art soaring above the gnawing afflictions fate hurled at him.
More Schumann: Symphonies 2 and 3, collections of lieder on recordings.