
Robert Schumann
Robert Schumann, sometimes given as Robert
Alexander Schumann, (8 June 1810 – 29 July 1856) was a German
composer,
aesthete and influential
music critic. He is one of the most famous and
important
Romantic composers of the
19th century.
Schumann had hoped to pursue a career as a
virtuoso pianist, having been assured by his
teacher,
Friedrich Wieck, that he
could become the finest pianist in Europe after only a few years of
study with him. However, when a self-inflicted hand injury
prevented those hopes from being realized, he decided to focus his
musical energies on composition. Schumann's published compositions
were written exclusively for the piano until 1840; he later
composed works for piano and orchestra, many
lieder (songs for voice and piano), four
symphonies, an
opera, and
other
orchestral,
choral and
chamber works.
His
writings about music appeared mostly in the Neue Zeitschrift für
Musik ("The New Journal for Music"), a Leipzig
-based
publication that he jointly founded.
In 1840, after a long and acrimonious legal battle with his piano
instructor (Wieck), Schumann married Wieck's daughter, pianist
Clara Wieck, who also composed music
and had a considerable concert career, including premieres of many
of her husband's works.
Robert Schumann died in middle age; for the last two years of his
life, after an attempted suicide, he was confined to a mental
institution at his own request.
Biography
Early life
Schumann
was born in Zwickau
, Saxony
the fifth
and last child of the family. Schumann began to compose
before the age of seven, but his boyhood was spent in the
cultivation of literature as much as music because his father,
August Schumann, was a bookseller,
publisher, and novelist.

House where Schumann was born
At age 14, Schumann wrote an essay on the aesthetics of music and
also contributed to a volume, edited by his father, titled
"Portraits of Famous Men." While still at school in Zwickau he read
the works of the German poet-philosophers
Friedrich Schiller and
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, as
well as
Byron
and the
Greek
tragedians. His most powerful and permanent literary
inspiration was
Jean Paul, whose influence
is seen in Schumann's youthful novels
Juniusabende,
completed in 1826, and
Selene.
Schumann's interest in music was prompted as a child by the
performance of
Ignaz Moscheles
playing at
Carlsbad, and he later developed
an interest in the works of
Ludwig
van Beethoven,
Franz Schubert and
Felix Mendelssohn. His father,
however, who had encouraged the boy's musical aspirations, died in
1826, and neither his mother nor his guardian thereafter encouraged
a career for him in music.
In 1828 he left school, and after a tour,
during which he met Heinrich Heine in
Munich
, he went to Leipzig to study law.
In 1829
his law studies continued in Heidelberg
.
1830–34
During
Eastertide 1830 he heard Niccolò Paganini play in Frankfurt
. In July he wrote to his mother, "My whole
life has been a struggle between Poetry and Prose, or call it Music
and Law." By Christmas he was back in Leipzig, taking piano lessons
from his old master Wieck, who assured him that he would be a
successful concert pianist.
During his studies with Wieck, Schumann permanently injured his
right hand. One suggested cause of this injury is that he damaged
his finger by the use of a mechanical device designed to strengthen
the weakest fingers, which held back one finger while he exercised
the others. Others have suggested that the injury was a side-effect
of syphilis medication. A more dramatic suggestion is that in an
attempt to increase the independence of his fourth finger, he may
have carried out a surgical procedure to separate the tendons of
the fourth finger from those of the third. The cause of the injury
is not known, but in any event Schumann abandoned ideas of a
concert career and devoted himself instead to composition. To this
end he began a course of theory under
Heinrich Dorn, a German composer six years his
senior and the conductor of the Leipzig opera at that time. About
this time Schumann considered composing an opera on the subject of
Hamlet.
Papillons
The fusion of the literary idea with its musical illustration,
which may be said to have first taken shape in
Papillons, Op. 2 ("Butterflies"), is
foreshadowed to some extent in his first written criticism, an 1831
essay on
Frédéric Chopin's
variations on a theme from
Mozart's
Don Giovanni, published in the
Allgemeine
musikalische Zeitung. Here Chopin's work is discussed by
the imaginary characters created by Schumann himself: Florestan
(the embodiment of Schumann's passionate, voluble side) and
Eusebius (his dreamy, introspective side) – the counterparts of
Vult and Walt in
Jean Paul's novel
Flegeljahre. A third, Meister Raro, is called upon for his
opinion. Raro may represent either the composer himself, Wieck's
daughter
Clara, or the combination of
the two (Cla
ra +
Robert).
However, by the time Schumann had written
Papillons in
1831 he went a step further. The scenes and characters of his
favorite novel had now passed definitely and consciously into the
written music, and in a letter from Leipzig (April 1832) he bids
his brothers "read the last scene in Jean Paul's
Flegeljahre as soon as possible, because the
Papillons are intended as a musical representation of that
masquerade."
In the
winter of 1832 Schumann visited his relations at Zwickau and
Schneeberg
, where he performed the first movement of his
Symphony in G minor. In Zwickau, the music was performed at
a concert given by Clara Wieck, who was 13 years old. On this
occasion Clara played bravura Variations by
Henri Herz, a composer whom Schumann was already
opposing as a philistine. It was also on this occasion that
Robert's mother said to Clara, "You must marry my Robert one day."
The G minor Symphony was not published by Schumann during his
lifetime, but has been played and recorded since then. The 1833
deaths of his brother Julius and his sister-in-law Rosalie
apparently affected Schumann with a profound melancholy, leading to
his first apparent attempt at suicide.
Die neue Zeitschrift für Musik
By spring 1834, Schumann had sufficiently recovered to inaugurate
Die Neue Zeitschrift
für Musik ("New Journal in Music"), first published on
April 3, 1834. Schumann published most of his critical writings in
the Journal, and often lambasted the popular taste for flashy
technical displays from figures Schumann perceived as inferior
composers. Schumann campaigned to revive interest in major
composers of the past, including
Mozart, Beethoven and
Weber, while he also promoted the work
of some contemporary composers, including Chopin (who did not like
Schumann's work) and
Berlioz, whom he
praised for creating music of substance. On the other hand,
Schumann disparaged the school of
Franz
Liszt and
Richard Wagner. Among
Schumann's associates at this time were composers Ludwig Schunke
(to whom Schumann's
Toccata in C is dedicated), and
Norbert Burgmüller.
Schumann's editorial duties during the summer of 1834 were
interrupted by his relations with 16-year-old Ernestine von
Fricken, to whom he became engaged. She was the adopted daughter of
a rich Bohemian, from whose variations on a theme Schumann
constructed his own
Symphonic Studies. Schumann
broke off that engagement due to his growing attraction to
15-year-old Clara Wieck. Flirtatious exchanges in the spring of
1835 led to their first kiss on the steps outside Wieck’s house in
November and mutual declarations of love the next month in Zwickau,
where Clara appeared in concert. Having learned in August that
Ernestine von Fricken’s birth was illegitimate, which meant that
she would have no dowry, and fearful that her limited means would
force him to earn his living like a ‘day-labourer’, Schumann
engineered a complete break towards the end of the year. But his
idyll with Clara was soon brought to an unceremonious end. When her
father became aware of their nocturnal trysts during the Christmas
holidays, he summarily forbade them further meetings.
Carnaval
Carnaval (Op. 9, 1834)
is one of Schumann's most genial and characteristic piano works.
Schumann
begins nearly every section of Carnaval with the musical
notes signified in German by the letters that spell Asch
(A, E-flat,
C, and B, or alternatively A-flat, C, and B; in German these are A,
Es, C and H, and As C and H respectively), the town (then in
Bohemia, now in the Czech Republic
) in which Ernestine was born, and the notes are
also the musical letters in Schumann's own name. Schumann
named sections for both Ernestine ("Estrella") and Clara
("Chiarina"). Eusebius and Florestan, the imaginary figures
appearing so often in his critical writings, also appear, alongside
brilliant imitations of Chopin and Paganini. The work comes to a
close with a march of the
Davidsbündler — the league of
King David's men against the
Philistines in which may be heard the clear
accents of truth in contest with the dull clamour of falsehood
embodied in a
quotation from the
seventeenth century
Grandfather's Dance. In
Carnaval, Schumann went further than in
Papillons, by conceiving the story as well as the musical
illustration.
1835–39
On 3 October 1835 Schumann met Mendelssohn at Wieck's house in
Leipzig, and his appreciation of that great contemporary was shown
with the same generous freedom that distinguished him in all his
relations to other musicians, and which later enabled him to
recognize the genius of the then-unknown
Johannes Brahms, when they first met in
1853.
In 1836 Schumann's acquaintance with Clara Wieck, already famous as
a pianist, ripened into love. A year later he asked her father's
consent to their marriage, but was refused.
In the series of piano pieces
Fantasiestücke, Op. 12, Schumann
once more gives a sublime illustration of the fusion of literary
and musical ideas as embodied conceptions in such pieces as
Warum and
In der
Nacht. After he had written the latter of these two he
detected in the music the fanciful suggestion of a series of
episodes from the story of
Hero and
Leander. The collection begins (in
Des
Abends) with a notable example of Schumann's predeliction for
rhythmic ambiguity, as unrelieved
syncopation plays heavily against the time
signature, similar to the
Faschingsschwank aus Wien's
first movement. After a nicely told fable, and the appropriately
titled "Dream's Confusion," the collection ends on an introspective
note in the manner of Eusebius.
The
Kinderszenen, Op. 15,
completed in 1838, a favourite of Schumann's piano works, is
playful and childlike, and nicely captures the innocence of
childhood. The
Träumerei is one of the most famous piano
pieces ever written, and exists in myriad forms and transcriptions,
and has been the favourite
encore
of several piano artists, including
Vladimir Horowitz. The piece appears
simple, but has been defended as "complex" in its harmonic
structure.
The
Kreisleriana (1838),
considered one of Schumann's greatest works, also carried his
fantasy and emotional range further.
Johannes Kreisler, the fictional poet
created by poet
E. T. A.
Hoffman who is limned as a
"romantic brought into contact with reality", was appropriated by
Schumann who used him as an imaginary mouthpiece for the sonic
expression of emotional states, in music that is "fantastic and
mad."
The
Fantasia in C, Op. 17, written in the summer of 1836,
is a work of passion and deep pathos, imbued with the spirit of
late Beethoven. This is no doubt deliberate, since the proceeds
from sales of the work were initially intended to be contributed
towards the construction of a monument to Beethoven (who had died
in 1827). The closing of the first movement of the Fantasy contains
a
musical quote from Beethoven's
song cycle,
An die ferne
Geliebte, Op. 98 (at the "Adagio" coda, taken from the
first song of
an die ferne Geliebte). According to Liszt,
who played the work for Schumann, and to whom Schumann dedicated
the work, the Fantasy was apt to be played too heavily, and should
have a dreamier (
träumerisch) character than vigorous
German pianists tended to impart. Liszt also said, "It is a noble
work, worthy of Beethoven, whose career, by the way, it is supposed
to represent."
In 1837 Schumann published his
Études symphoniques, a complex
set of variations written in 1834-1835, which demand a powerful
piano technique.
After a
visit to Vienna
during which
he discovered Franz Schubert's
previously unknown Symphony
No. 9 in C, in
1839 Schumann wrote the
Faschingsschwank aus Wien
("Carnival Prank from Vienna"). Most of the joke is in the central
section of the first movement, into which a thinly veiled reference
to the
Marseillaise (then
banned in Vienna owing to the memory of
Napoleon's Austrian invasion) is squeezed. The
festive mood does not preclude moments of melancholic introspection
in the Intermezzo.
After a long and acrimonious legal battle with her father (which
was ultimately resolved by waiting until she was of legal age and
therefore no longer subject to the father's command), Schumann
married Clara Wieck on 12 September 1840, at
Schönefeld.
1840–49
Before 1840, Schumann had written almost exclusively for the piano,
but in this one year he wrote 168 songs. 1840 (scholars refer to it
as the
Liederjahr or "year of the lied") is the most
important time in Schumann's musical legacy. He had secretly
courted Clara because her father did not accept him as a suitor.
They exchanged love letters and rendezvoused in secret. Robert
would often wait in a cafe for hours in a nearby city just to see
Clara for a few minutes after one of her concerts. After this long
courtship, they finally married in 1840, and this great outpour of
lieder (vocal songs with piano accompaniment) is directly related
to the happiness he felt from finally having his Clara. This is
evident in "Widmung", for example, where he uses the melody from
Schubert's "Ave Maria" in the
postlude- as a means of exalting Clara. Schumann's biographers have
attributed the sweetness, the doubt and the despair of these songs
to the varying emotions aroused by his love for Clara. Robert and
Clara had eight children, one of whom died in infancy.
His chief song-cycles of this period were his settings of the
Liederkreis of
Joseph von Eichendorff (Op.
39), the
Frauenliebe und
-leben of
Chamisso
(Op. 42), the
Dichterliebe of
Heine (Op. 48) and
Myrthen,
a collection of songs, including poems by Goethe,
Rückert, Heine, Byron,
Burns and Moore. The songs
Belsatzar
(Op. 57) and
Die beiden Grenadiere (Op. 49), both to
Heine's words, show Schumann at his best as a ballad writer, though
the dramatic ballad is less congenial to him than the introspective
lyric.The opus 35 (to words of
Justinus
Kerner) and opus 40 sets, although less well known, also
contain songs of lyric and dramatic quality.
As Grillparzer said, "He has
made himself a new ideal world in which he moves almost as he
wills."
Despite
his achievements, Schumann received few tokens of honour; he was
awarded a doctoral degree by the University of Jena
in 1840, and in 1843 a professorship in the
Conservatory of Music
which Felix
Mendelssohn had founded in Leipzig that same year. On
one occasion, accompanying his wife on a concert tour in Russia,
Schumann was asked whether 'he too was a musician'. He was to
remain sensitive to his wife's greater international acclaim as a
pianist.
In 1841 he wrote two of his four symphonies. He devoted 1842 to
composing chamber music, which included the
Piano Quintet in E flat, Op. 44,
now one of his best known and most admired works. In 1843 he wrote
Paradise and the
Peri, his first essay at concerted vocal music. After
this, his compositions were not confined during any particular
period to any one form.
The stage in his life when he was deeply engaged in setting
Goethe's
Faust to music (1844–53) was
a critical one for his health. He spent the first half of 1844 with
Clara on tour in Russia.
On returning to Germany he abandoned his
editorial work, and left Leipzig for Dresden
, where he suffered from persistent "nervous prostration". As soon as
he began to work he was seized with fits of shivering and an
apprehension of death, which was exhibited in an abhorrence for
high places, for all metal instruments (even keys), and for drugs.
Schumann's diaries also state that he suffered perpetually from
imagining that he had the
note A5 sounding in
his ears.
In 1846 he felt recovered and in the winter
revisited Vienna, traveling to Prague
and Berlin
in the
spring of 1847 and in the summer to Zwickau, where he was received
with enthusiasm. This pleased him, since at that time he was
famous only in Dresden and Leipzig.
His only opera was written in 1848:
Genoveva, Op. 81. It is interesting for its
attempt to abolish the
recitative, which
Schumann regarded as an interruption to the musical flow. The
subject of
Genoveva, based on
Ludwig Tieck and
Christian Friedrich Hebbel, was
not a happy choice; but it is worth remembering that as early as
1842 the possibilities of German opera had been keenly realized by
Schumann, who wrote, "Do you know my prayer as an artist, night and
morning? It is called 'German Opera.' Here is a real field for
enterprise . . . something simple, profound, German." And in his
notebook of suggestions for the text of operas are found amongst
others:
Nibelungen,
Lohengrin and
Till Eulenspiegel. Schumann's
consistently flowing melody in this work can be seen as a
forerunner to Wagner's
Melos.
The music to
Byron's
Manfred was written in 1849.
The insurrection of Dresden caused
Schumann to move to Kreischa
, a little village a few miles outside the
city. In August 1849, on the occasion of the
hundredth anniversary of Goethe's birth, such scenes of Schumann's
Faust as were already completed were performed in Dresden,
Leipzig and Weimar
, Liszt, as
always giving unwearied assistance and encouragement. The
rest of the work was written later in 1849, and the overture (which
Schumann described as "one of the sturdiest of [his] creations") in
1853.
After 1850
From 1850 to 1854, the nature of Schumann's works is extremely
varied. The popular belief that the quality of his music quickly
decayed has been questioned: the changes in style may be explained
by lucid experimentation.
In 1850
Schumann succeeded Ferdinand Hiller
as musical director at Düsseldorf
, but he was a poor conductor and quickly aroused
the opposition of the musicians. His contract was eventually
terminated. From 1851 to 1853 he visited Switzerland, Belgium and
Leipzig. In 1851 he completed his
Symphony No. 3 "Rhenish", and he revised what
would be published as his
fourth symphony. On 30 September
1853, the 20-year-old Brahms knocked unannounced on the door of the
Schumanns carrying a letter of introduction from the violinist
Joseph Joachim (Schumann was not at
home, and would not meet Brahms until the next day). Brahms amazed
Clara and Robert with his music, stayed with them for several weeks
and became a close family friend (later working closely with Clara
to popularize Schumann's compositions during her long widowhood).
During this time Schumann, Brahms and Schumann's pupil
Albert Dietrich collaborated on the
composition of the
'F-A-E' Sonata for
Joachim; Schumann also published an article, "
Neue Bahnen"
(New Paths) hailing the unknown young composer (Brahms) from
Hamburg, who had published nothing, as "the Chosen One" who "was
destined to give ideal expression to the times.†It was an
extraordinary way to present Brahms to the musical world, setting
up enormous expectations of him which he did not fulfill for many
years.
In
January 1854, Schumann went to Hanover
, where he heard a performance of his Paradise
and the Peri organized by Joachim and Brahms.
Schumann returned to Düsseldorf and set himself to editing his
complete works and making an anthology on the subject of music, but
a renewal of the symptoms that had threatened him earlier showed
itself. Besides the single note, he now imagined that voices
sounded in his ear and he heard angelic music. One night he
suddenly left his bed, having dreamt or imagined that a ghost
(purportedly the spirit of either Schubert or Mendelssohn) had
dictated a "spirit theme" to him. In truth, this theme was merely a
recollection of one he had used several times before: in his Second
String Quartet, again in his Lieder-Album für die Jugend, and
finally in the slow movement of his
Violin Concerto In the days
leading up to his suicide attempt, Schumann wrote five variations
on this theme for the piano, his last published work. Brahms
published the theme in a supplementary volume to the complete
edition of Schumann's piano music, and in 1861 Brahms himself wrote
a substantial set of variations upon it for piano duet, his Op.
23.
In late February Schumann's symptoms increased, the angelic visions
sometimes being replaced by demonic visions. He warned Clara that
he feared he might do her harm.
On 27 February 1854, he attempted suicide by
throwing himself from a bridge into the Rhine
River. Rescued by boatmen and taken home, he asked to be
taken to an asylum for the insane.
He entered Dr. Franz Richarz' sanitarium
in Endenich
, a quarter of Bonn
, and
remained there until his death on 29 July 1856.
Given his reported symptoms, one modern view is that his death was
a result of
syphilis, which he may have
contracted during his student days, and which would have remained
latent during most of his marriage. According to studies by the
musicologist and literary scholar
Eric
Sams, Schumann's symptoms during his terminal illness and death
appear consistent with those of
mercury poisoning, mercury being a common
treatment for syphilis and other conditions. Schumann was buried at
the Zentral Friedhof ("Central Cemetery"), Bonn. In 1880, a statue
by
Adolf von Donndorf was erected
on his tomb.
From the time of her husband's death, Clara devoted herself
principally to the interpretation of her husband's works. In 1856,
she first visited England, but the critics received Schumann's
music coolly, with some critics such as
Henry Fothergill Chorley
particularly harsh in their disapproval. She returned to London in
1865 and made regular appearances there in subsequent years. She
became the authoritative editor of her husband's works for
Breitkopf und Härtel. It was
rumored that she and Brahms destroyed many of Schumann's later
works that they thought to be tainted by his madness. However, only
the
Five Pieces for Cello and Piano are known to have been
destroyed. Most of Schumann's late works, particularly the
Violin Concerto, the
Fantasy
for Violin and Orchestra and the Third Violin Sonata, all from
1853, have entered the repertoire.
Legacy
Schumann exerted considerable influence in the nineteenth century
and beyond, despite his adoption of more conservative modes of
composition after his marriage. He left an array of acclaimed music
in virtually all the forms then known. Partly through his protégé
Brahms, Schumann's ideals and musical vocabulary became widely
disseminated. Composer
Edward Elgar
called Schumann "my ideal."
Schumann
has not often been confused with Austrian composer Franz Schubert, but one well-known example
occurred in 1956, when East Germany
issued a pair of postage stamps featuring
Schumann's picture against an open score that featured Schubert's
music. The stamps were soon replaced by a pair featuring
music written by Schumann.
Compositions
Media
Media files for the
Kinderszenen can be found with the article
on them.
References
- Daverio, J, "Robert Schumann," Grove music online, L
Macy (ed), accessed June 24, 2007 (subscription
access)
- Ostwald, Peter, Schumann — The inner voices of a musical
genius, Northeastern University Press, Boston, 1985 ISBN
1555530141.
- Scholes, Percy A, The Oxford Companion to Music, Tenth
Edition, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1970 ISBN
0-19-311306-61.
Notes
- Daverio, Grove online. According to Daverio, there is no
evidence of a middle name "Alexander" which is given in some
sources.
- Scholes, page 932.
- Ostwald, page 11
- Robert Schumann, musical Journal
- Berthold Litzmann 1910
- Vladimir Ashkenazy's notes, Favourite
Chopin
- Alban Berg,
replying to charges that modern music was overly complex, pointed
out that Kinderszenen is constructed on a complex
base.
- Strelezki: Personal Recollections of Chats with Liszt
- Anton Strelezki: Personal Recollections of Chats with Liszt.
London, 1893.
- Daverio, Grove online, 19
- Robert Schumann's Artikel Neue Bahnen, 28 October 1853
- Brahms' A German Requiem, published in
1868, brought the first widespread agreement of his talent
- From All Music Guide, available at
http://www.answers.com/topic/variations-on-an-original-theme-for-piano-in-e-flat-major-geister-variationen-woo-24
- Reich, Nancy B., "Clara Schumann: The Artist and the Woman,"
Cornell University Press, 1985, p. 151.
Further reading
- Fuller-Maitland, John Alexander. (1884). Schumann. S.
Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington (reissued by Cambridge University Press, 2009;
ISBN 9781108004817)
- . The first Schumann biography arguing that the composer was
mentally sane and normal all his life, until the sudden onset of
insanity (resulting from the tertiary stage of syphilis).
External links
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