Previous Next

Robert Schumann (1810 –1856) was a German composer and pianist. He was one of the most famous Romantic composers of the nineteenth century, as well as a famous music critic. An intellectual as well as an aesthete, his music reflects the deeply personal nature of Romanticism. Introspective and often whimsical, his early music was an attempt to break with the tradition of classical forms and structure which he thought too restrictive. Little understood in his lifetime, much of his music is now regarded as daringly original in harmony, rhythm and form. He stands in the front rank of German Romantics.

Robert Schumann was born on June 8, 1810 in Zwickau in Saxony. His father was a publisher, and it was in the cultivation of literature quite as much as in that of music that his boyhood was spent. Schumann himself said that he began to compose before his seventh year.

At fourteen he wrote an essay on the aesthetics of music and also contributed to a volume edited by his father and entitled "Portraits of Famous Men". While still at school in Zwickau he read, besides Friedrich Schiller and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Lord Byron and the Greek tragedians. But the most powerful as well as the most permanent of the literary influences exercised upon him was undoubtedly that of Johann Paul Friedrich Richter. This influence may clearly be seen in his youthful novels Juniusabende and Selene, of which the first only was completed in 1826.

In 1828 he left school, and after a tour, during which he met Heinrich Heine in Munich, he went to Leipzig to study law. His interest in music was piqued as child by the sounds of Ignaz Moscheles playing at Carlsbad and even more so by the works of Franz Schubert and Felix Mendelssohn later. His father, however, who had encouraged the boy's musical aspirations, died in 1826, and neither his mother nor his guardian would encourage a career for him in music.

So Schumann set out to study law, at Leipzig and later at Heidelberg (1829). However he abandoned the pursuit, and instead, to use his own words, "Nature's pupil pure and simple" began composing songs.

The restless spirit by which he was pursued is disclosed in his letters of the period. On Easter, 1830 he heard Niccolò Paganini play in Frankfurt. In July in this year he wrote to his mother, "My whole life has been a struggle between Poetry and Prose, or call it Music and Law," and by Christmas he was once more in Leipzig, taking piano lessons with his old master, Friedrich Wieck.

In his anxiety to accelerate the process by which he could acquire a perfect execution, he permanently injured his right hand. Another authority states that the right-hand disability was caused by syphilis medication. Those who claim the former state that he attempted a radical surgical procedure to separate the tendons of the fourth finger from those of the third (the ring finger musculature is linked to that of the third finger, thus making it the "weakest" finger). Another, less dramatic view is that he damaged his finger by the use of a mechanism of his own invention, which was intended to hold back one finger while he practiced exercises with the others. Regardless, his ambitions as a pianist being suddenly ruined, he determined to devote himself entirely to composition, and began a course of theory under Heinrich Dorn, conductor of the Leipzig opera. About this time he contemplated composing an opera on the subject of Hamlet.

On October 3, 1835 Schumann met Mendelssohn at Wieck's house in Leipzig, and his appreciation of his 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 Brahms, whom he first met in 1853 before he had established a reputation.

In 1836 Schumann's acquaintance with Clara Wieck, already famous as a pianist, ripened into love, and a year later he asked her father's consent to their marriage, but was met with a refusal. In the series Fantasiestücke for the piano (op. 12) he 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 just as in the first movement of Fasschingschwank aus Wien. After a nicely told fable, and the appropriately titled "Whirring Dreams," the whole collection ends on an introspective note in the manner of Eusebius.

The Kinderszenen, completed in 1838, a favourite of Schumann's piano works, is playful and childlike, and in a wonderfully fresh way 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 artists, including Vladimir Horowitz. Although deceptively simple, Alban Berg, in reply to charges that modern music was overly complex, pointed out that this piece is in no way as simple as it appears in its harmonic structure. The whole collection is deceptive in its simplicity, yet genuinely touching and refreshing.

The Kreisleriana, which is considered one of his greatest works, was also written in 1838, and in this the composer's fantasy and emotional range is again carried a step further. Johannes Kreisler, the romantic poet brought into contact with the real world, was a character drawn from life by the poet E. T. A. Hoffmann (q.v.), and Schumann utilized 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. According to Liszt, (Strelezki- Personal Recollections of Chats with Liszt) who played the work to the composer, and to whom the work was dedicated, the Fantasy was apt to be played too heavily, and should have a dreamier (träumerisch) character than vigorous German pianists tended to labour. He also said, "It is a noble work, worthy of Beethoven, whose career, by the way, it is supposed to represent."

After a visit to Vienna during which he discovered Schubert's previously unknown Symphony No. 9 in C, in 1839 he wrote the Faschingsschwank aus Wien, i.e. the 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—is squeezed. The festive mood does not preclude moments of melancholic introspection in the Intermezzo. As Wieck still withheld his consent to their marriage, Robert and Clara at last dispensed with it, and were married on September 12 at Schönefeld, near Leipzig.

The year 1840 may be said to have yielded the most extraordinary results in Schumann's career. Until now he had written almost solely for the pianoforte, but in this one year he wrote 168 songs. Schumann's biographers represent him as caught in a tempest of song, the sweetness, the doubt and the despair of which are all to be attributed to varying emotions aroused by his love for Clara. Although there is possibly some truth to this, this rather mawkish view is treated with scepticism by modern scholars, especially since Dichterliebe, with its themes of rejection and acceptance, was written at a time when his marriage was no longer in doubt.

From 1850 to 1854, the nature, and admittedly the quality, of Schumann's works is extremely varied. In 1850, he succeeded Ferdinand Hiller as musical director at Düsseldorf; in 1851-1853, he visited Switzerland and Belgium as well as Leipzig. In 1851, he completed his so-called Rhenish symphony, and he revised what would be published as his fourth symphony. In October 1853, he was bowled over by the talent of the 20-year-old Johannes Brahms, who had appeared on his doorstep and spent a month with the Schumanns. During this time Schumann, Brahms and Schumann's pupil Albert Dietrich collaborated on the composition of the 'F-A-E' Sonata for the violinist Joseph Joachim; Schumann also published an article, “Neue Bahnen” (New Paths) hailing the unknown from Hamburg as “the Chosen One” who would “give ideal expression to the Age.” In January 1854, Schumann went to Hannover, where he heard a performance of his Paradise and the Peri organized by Joachim and Brahms.

Soon after his return to Düsseldorf, where he was engaged in editing his complete works and making an anthology on the subject of music, a renewal of the symptoms that had threatened him before showed itself. Besides the single note, he now imagined that voices sounded in his ear. One night he suddenly left his bed, saying that Schubert and Mendelssohn had sent him a theme - actually a reminiscence of his violin concerto - which he must write down, and on this theme he wrote five variations for the pianoforte, his last work. Brahms published the theme in a supplementary volume to the complete edition of Schumann's piano music, and in 1861 himself wrote a substantial set of variations upon it, for piano duet, his op.23.

On February 27, 1854, Schumann threw himself into the Rhine. He was rescued by boatmen, but when brought to land was determined to be quite insane. When Schumann requested that he be taken to an asylum, Dr. Franz Richarz's sanitarium in Endenich, a quarter of Bonn, was chosen. After decades of speculation by pathologists, musicians, biographers and music lovers, the publication of Dr. Richarz's records on his most celebrated patient point conclusively to the effects of tertiary syphilis as the underlying cause of Schumann's many physical and mental illnesses. This, in addition to his introspective, withdrawn character and the treatments he endured, particularly mercury applications, contributed to his ultimate demise.

He died on July 29, 1856. He was buried at the Zentral Friedhof, Bonn. In 1880, a statue by A. Donndorf was erected on his tomb.

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 was at the time a common treatment for syphilis and many other conditions.

From the time of her husband's death, Clara devoted herself principally to the interpretation of her husband's works, but when in 1856 she first visited England the critics received Schumann's music with a degree of coolness, and in some quarters (especially in the person of Henry Fothergill Chorley) a chorus of disapprobation. She returned to London in 1865 and continued her visits annually; with the exception of four seasons, she appeared each year. She became the authoritative editor of her husband's works for Breitkopf und Härtel. It is rumored that she and her good friend, Johannes Brahms, destroyed many of Schumann's later works that they thought to be tainted by his madness. However, apart from the Five Pieces for Cello and Piano no other pieces are known to have actually been destroyed. As a result of their survival most of the late works, particularly the violin concerto, the Fantasy for Violin and Orchestra and the third violin sonata, all from 1853, have entered the critical and performing repertoire as recognized masterpieces.

Previous Next