Robert Schumann

by Martin Geck

  Following in his father’s footsteps, Schumann noted in 1827, “Political freedom is perhaps the true midwife of poetry: it is this that is most needed for poetry to flourish: in a country where there is serfdom and bondage and so on, true poetry can never thrive: I mean the poetry that permeates public life as an inflammatory & inspirational force.”29 That this was no passing phase in Schumann’s development is clear from a letter that he wrote in 1828 to his school friend Eduard Moritz Rascher, who by then was president of the Literary Society that Schumann had founded at the Zwickau Lyceum. As for “the young fruit tree that I have planted,” Schumann wrote, he urged his correspondent to show “the greatest possible caution, for otherwise the authorities may easily track it down not least because the Leipzig student organization is currently threatened with a serious inquiry, which would spell the end of all our fun.” Schumann then came to the heart of the matter and explained why “under the present circumstances” he had “no intention of joining the actual student organization”: although the movement was “undeniably based on a splendid idea and an ideal principle,” it was pointless “sitting in a bar & discussing wild & nebulous ideas” in an attempt to put all these laudable aims into practice: “This is not the way to reform the world or Europe or Germany or Saxony or Leipzig or any human being or student.” Fifteen hundred students were not enough “to re-educate millions.” People must realize that “the world can never be cut to the size they want but only to the way that time, molding it by degrees, dictates.” At the present point in time “no sense of nationality can be created” because “those who want it are not elected by the nation.”

  “And so it follows,” Schumann concludes, “that concepts such as nationhood etc. are mere figments of the imagination that fly in the face of the spirit of the age and are incompatible with it.” This belief was confirmed by Schumann’s feeling that the students he met in Leipzig were often no more than “weak, sickly, biased, & recalcitrant creatures.” They must first become “human beings” and find a “more moderate, more humane, and more beautiful middle ground” between opposing extremes. Only then was it possible to forget “all political goals & demagogic figments of the imagination.”30 For a youth who had only just turned eighteen, this was an astonishingly mature reflection that requires no further comment here but which readers are invited to bear in mind in due course when we come to consider Schumann’s attitude during the revolutions of 1848 and 1849.

  Intermezzo I

  An Awkward Age

  Some of the books that we read can save our lives—literally or metaphorically—and it is no accident that the young Schumann described Jean Paul’s Flegeljahre (The awkward age) as his “bible.” When, at the age of seventeen, he wondered how he would view the world if he had not encountered Jean Paul’s writings, Jean Paul himself had been dead for only three years and from a literary point of view was still very much alive. Schumann may well have looked on him as a kind of elder brother—as someone who knew what was what.

  Writers on Schumann have long since acknowledged that the heroes of Jean Paul’s novel, Vult and Walt, are the models for his own aesthetic constructs, Florestan and Eusebius: Vult is the musician, Walt the poet. Moreover, the two characters, for all their differences, represent a unity that Schumann himself, as an aspiring artist, undoubtedly found immensely fascinating. It is one to which we shall often have occasion to refer in the course of the following pages.

  But there is something else that deserves to be mentioned here, and it is scarcely less significant—namely, the background against which the novel is set, for this was the only conceivable biotope in which Schumann could breathe freely. Even more importantly, the whole of the novel pulsates with music: “Richter [i.e., Jean Paul] poeticizes musical fantasies,” Novalis wrote enthusiastically.1 Vult’s flute may be heard from every point of the compass, and there are concerts in every better kind of garden. How fortunate it was, moreover, for Schumann as a would-be professional musician that he found in his model not only a writer whose heart had “ears,” allowing him to rhapsodize in verse about the divine impact of music,2 but also one who was an expert on music conversant with terms such as “reiner Satz” (“pure composition”), “enharmonic change,” and “consecutive (or parallel) fifths.” Jean Paul was also a writer who wanted listeners to be guided by their feelings of the moment and also to be able to follow the structure of a piece—after a concert that Walt had praised to the skies and that had moved him to tears, Vult asks:

  But how did you hear it? Did you listen ahead and retrospectively, or did the piece just pass by in front of you? The common people are like cattle hearing only the present, not the two polar times, only musical syllables, not the syntax. A good listener remembers the antecedent of a musical period in order to be able to form a clear grasp of the consequent phrase.3

  Schumann would have shouted with joy on reading such sentences, which are almost without precedent in the literature of the age: not only did they provide him with sustenance for his soul, they also prepared him for his coming vocation.

  Within the artistic biotope of Jean Paul’s novel, music permeates not only weekends and holidays but also the quotidian round. And the same is true of poetry: Walt writes flowery verse, and the twins work on a novel with the title Hoppelpoppel, or The Heart. Even the title reveals the clash between the finite and the infinite and between profound emotion and the droll. But the brothers become even more caught up in reality when they send their opening chapters to the Leipzig publisher Magister Dyck and receive a reply to the effect that he “may publish pleasantries by Rabener and Wezel, but never ones like these.”4

  Jean Paul—depicted in the drawing overleaf in an ironically exaggerated pose—is referring here to two of his rivals, Gottlieb Wilhelm Rabener and Johann Karl Wezel, both of whom wrote satirical novels. As such, the reference finds Jean Paul engaging fully with real life, and in this respect too he could reckon on the interest of the young Schumann, who was, after all, the son of a publisher and bookseller. As such, he was enough of a scholar and a bookworm to enjoy the literary allusions with which Jean Paul peppered the footnotes of his “pleasantries” in a way that was half serious and half ironic. Most memorably of all, the music dealer Johann Carl Friedrich Rellstab appears in Flegeljahre in apparent anticipation of Schumann’s own life—Rellstab was the father of Ludwig Rellstab, who, as we shall see, was to make life difficult for the composer of the Kinderscenen.

  All in all, then, there was a constant interplay and overlap between reality and fiction, between actual experience and a riotous imagination, between daily concerns and far-fetched plans, and between fears and feelings of happiness. The young Schumann would not have been affected by all this if Flegeljahre had not demonstrated that one could live one’s life as if a character in a novel by Jean Paul. When we recall that he began to study law in keeping with his mother’s wishes even though he was powerfully drawn to music and poetry, then it will be clear that in this respect, too, the novel struck him as profoundly consoling. Of the two protagonists, Vult, as a professional musician, was the more down-to-earth, while the more sensitive poet Walt muddles through as best he can as a notary. Could jurisprudence and the arts be reconciled after all?

  Jean Paul. (Courtesy of agk-images, Berlin.)

  As a musician, Schumann admired Beethoven, describing him as “the Jean Paul of music.”5 But his thinking was not yet sufficiently advanced for him to be able to follow his model in matters of compositional rigor. Here he preferred to stick to the rampant imagination of a writer like Jean Paul, who was less “demanding” than Beethoven and who “invited” visitors to enter his biotope. And Schumann must have welcomed the fact that Flegeljahre keeps breaking off at random points in its narrative instead of moving toward a glorious finale like one of Beethoven’s symphonies. At this date Schumann would probably have foundered on such high-flown concepts, whereas Jean Paul was able to show him the way forward. Although his earliest works are on a far smaller scale t
han Flegeljahre, they reveal a similar head-in-the-clouds mentality. Jean Paul encouraged Schumann to listen to the “inner voice” to which he would later pay homage on a separate stave in his Humoresque op. 20.

  “I’m now having myself painted in miniature; if it’s a good likeness, I’ll send it to you; the beautiful new crimson coat costing eighty-five florins is also featured in it,” Schumann informed his mother in a letter written from Heidelberg on February 24, 1830 (Jugendbriefe von Robert Schumann 22). It is in fact a bluish-black coat that he can be seen wearing in the miniature above, which was painted on ivory by an unknown artist. On the back is a golden S with a red band representing the student society of Saxoborussia. Schumann gave the miniature to his fiancée, Ernestine von Fricken, and it is now owned by the Heinrich Heine Institute in Düsseldorf. (Photograph courtesy of the Heinrich Heine Institut, Düsseldorf.)

  CHAPTER 2

  Student Years (1828–34)

  Music gives me everything that people are unable to give, and the piano tells me all about the lofty feelings that I myself cannot express.

  Schumann to his mother, August 31, 18281

  Mulus was the term applied to students between the time they left school and the start of their university course. As such, it described a person who, like a mule, did not know exactly where he belonged. In much the same way, the seventeen-year-old Schumann, about to study law in Leipzig at his mother’s behest and against his own better judgment, still did not know where he was really heading. And yet he had a clear idea of the first thing he would do after matriculating at the university: he would undertake a pilgrimage to Bayreuth. It would not, of course, be to visit Wagner, who had yet to found the Bayreuth Festival (although he could have watched the fourteen-year-old Wagner writing his schoolboy drama Leubald in Leipzig). Rather, it was to see the places associated with Jean Paul, including the writer’s grave. “I am just returning from the famous Rollwenzel,” he told his brother Julius on April 25, 1828, “Jean Paul was a regular visitor here for twenty-six years of his life.”2

  Schumann was accompanied on his visit by one of his friends from school, Gisbert Rosen. Together they then traveled to Munich via Augsburg, for Schumann was anxious to meet Heinrich Heine, whose Reisebilder (Travel pictures) and Buch der Lieder (Book of songs) meant almost as much to him as Jean Paul’s novels and the short stories of E. T. A. Hoffmann. Heine accorded the two students an affable welcome at his house in the city and afterward took them on a guided tour of the art gallery in the Leuchtenberg Palace. Schumann’s diary contains the laconic note: “Witty conversation—ironic little man.”3

  Schumann’s first term at university brought him back to earth with a bump: “I can take no pleasure in cold jurisprudence, the frigid definitions of which crush you from the outset,” he told his mother. “I won’t study medicine, and I can’t study theology.”4 Her reply made him feel “so sad that I can draw only sad conclusions about your mental and physical state.”5 In spite of his feelings of guilt and no matter what he may have told the outside world, he had already made up his mind to do something different. But was it music? It is impossible to say for certain.

  By this time, ideas such as “universal poetry” and “the total artwork” were already in the air. The first of them had been put into circulation by the early romantic poet Friedrich Schlegel, while the second is first explicitly mentioned by Karl Friedrich Eusebius Trahndorff in his Aesthetics, or Teaching of Philosophy and Art (1827). Although he was an avid reader, Schumann tended to avoid writings on philosophy, but he followed current discussions on an art that admitted to no particular interests and that could certainly not be reduced to the tools of an individual trade. Rather, such an art should contribute to society as a whole and at the same time usher in the social changes that politicians had failed to achieve but which continued to haunt the minds of contemporaries in the form of a vision of a utopian future.

  Although Schumann later kept his distance from his two close contemporaries Liszt and Wagner, there was one point on which they shared a number of common beliefs in the 1830s, namely, the search for ways of ensuring that the grand idea of a universal art might acquire a physical, tangible form.

  However much Schumann may have been exercised by this question, there was nothing unworldly about his brooding. He retained a sense of pragmatism after leaving school, refusing to put all his eggs in one basket but seeking to keep open his options as a pianist, journalist, and composer. We shall shortly discover the extent to which he succeeded in this aim. For the present, here are the opening shorthand entries in his project book in which he documented his life between 1828 and 1834:

  University life 1828.

  Emil Flechsig as roommate—enthusiasm for Jean Paul, Franz Schubert—compositions: polonaises for four hands, songs etc.—

  Student activities—

  Götte from Braunschweig—Renz, dissolute, but good-natured fellow

  Moritz Semmel

  Piano lessons with Wieck—

  Often with Dr. Carus—Marschner—

  Quartet evening in winter: Glock, Täglichsbeck, Sörgel.

  Quartet for piano & strings—

  1829

  To Heidelberg at Easter—travel there with Wi[l]libald Alexis—

  Living with Rosen and Semmel

  In August & September visit Switzerland and Italy.

  Winter 1829–30, dissolute life spent drinking and playing the piano a lot—

  Fritz Weber from Trieste, now a doctor in London—

  Henriette Hofmeister—

  1830 June or July decision in favor of music

  (Papillons—Abegg Variations) Röller.

  Visit to Baden-Baden. Violinist Ernst.

  Previously (Easter 1830) visit Frankfurt with Töpken to hear Paganini.

  July Revolution 1830.

  Visit Strasbourg with Röller & Auerswald.

  In fall 1830 return to Leipzig over the Rhine & Detmold—

  Bad period.

  Board with Wieck. Chopin’s appearance.

  Mechanical studies taken to excessive lengths. A few lessons with Music Director Kupsch.6

  These entries date from 1843 and until recently have been published in only fragmentary form. Schumann was concerned with imposing some sense of order on his diaries and closing any gaps that he found there, with the result that these jottings lack the spontaneity of others drawn up at an earlier date. On the other hand, they focus on what the then thirty-three-year-old Schumann felt was memorable after an interval of a dozen or so years. First and foremost the present-day reader is struck by the names of many of Schumann’s fellow students, all of whom were the same age as he was: Georg Auerswald, Emil Flechsig, Wilhelm Götte, Johann Friedrich Renz, Eduard Röller, Gisbert Rosen, Moritz Semmel, Theodor Töpken, and Friedrich Weber. Presumably Schumann not only enjoyed their student company but also shared with them the urge to nudge society along the road of intellectual advancement. Semmel, who was related to Schumann by marriage, proved such an exceptional law student that he later became a local magistrate in Gera. But during his student days, he adopted the nom de plume “Justiziar Abrecher” (literally, a legal adviser who settles old scores) as a member of Schumann’s League of David, about which we shall have more to say in due course.

  It is also symptomatic of Schumann’s whole thinking at this time that in the course of his travels he was moved to visit the writer Willibald Alexis, his senior by twelve years, who was then editing the Konversationsblatt in Berlin, a periodical which in 1830 merged with the liberal Der Freimüthige. In 1835, Alexis resigned in protest at increasing censorship, a move that demonstrates the extent to which the juste milieu was then bearing down on many contemporaries with all its oppressive weight. It is no accident, therefore, that in spite of the brevity of his jottings, Schumann found time to mention the July revolution that broke out in Paris in 1830. And the words “Bad period” presumably relate to the unrest in Leipzig in the September of that same year. His diary 5, which contains not
es on his visit to Strasbourg, includes a whole series of entries on this subject, one of which reads: “Copied out French Lord’s Prayer from original in Strasbourg.” The prayer begins: “Our Late King, which art a scoundrel; thy name be accursed; thy kingdom never come; thy will be done neither in France nor elsewhere; give us this day our 46 million florins that thou owest us & forgive us our trespasses for not having sent you packing long ago.”7 Schumann also copied out a report from the Journal des Débats announcing that in the course of the uprising in Leipzig, burghers and students had made common cause in their hostility toward the authorities.

  These facts cannot and should not be overlooked by anyone wanting to understand the young Schumann, nor should their importance be exaggerated, for most of the entries in the aforementioned travel diary are of a non-political nature. In describing his own experiences Schumann adopts a tone that is either objective or—in the manner of Jean Paul—half effusive and half ironic, making it clear that music is permanently in his thoughts. And it is music, together with the cultivation of his circle of friends, that dominates the summary of his student years quoted above.

  Law is not mentioned once in this summary, an omission confirmed by Schumann’s friend Emil Flechsig: “He enrolled as a law student, I bought a briefcase for him, and he added his name to the list of students who would be attending the lectures by Krug and Otto, but that was the full extent of his involvement in the course at the Academy. Otherwise he never set foot in a lecture hall.”8 This may well be a wild exaggeration, for Schumann himself assured his mother that he regularly attended classes and wrote out what he heard there “with mechanical efficiency” as there was nothing else he could do.9 But Flechsig’s account must contain at least a grain of truth.