by Martin Geck
The following year, 1842, was largely given over to chamber music, which is the subject of our next chapter. We may return, therefore, to our account of a typical day in the life of this liberal-minded and cosmopolitan couple. In February they traveled via Oldenburg and Bremen to Hamburg, where Clara gave a recital and Schumann conducted his First Symphony. They then went their separate ways, albeit only briefly. For Clara, it was an opportunity to visit Copenhagen, and although she had considerable scruples about undertaking the trip, it proved a successful venture and contributed a few hundred thalers to the couple’s coffers. Schumann meanwhile returned to Leipzig and struck a reflective note in his marriage diary:
Our separation has brought home to me our curious and difficult situation. Should I neglect my talent in order to serve as your companion on your travels? And you, should you ignore your own talent because I am fettered to my newspaper and to my piano? At a time when you are young & in your prime? We’ve found a solution: you took a companion with you, & I returned home to our child & to my work. But what will the world say? And so my thoughts torment me.23
Schumann even toyed with the idea of taking soundings in America in the hope of finding better conditions for the couple’s artistic coexistence. Meanwhile his Spring Symphony was continuing to attract attention, and after a further performance in the Gewandhaus Clara noted in their marriage diary: “It went well and again was well received, but the happiness that I feel on hearing a composition by my Robert is something that no one else can know!”24 Shortly before that, however, she had reported on her “indescribable sadness”: “I feel that you no longer love me as you once did, I often feel so clearly that I’m not good enough for you, and when you’re affectionate, I sometimes feel that I must ascribe this to your kind heart.”25
As time went on, Clara continued to fret about her husband’s tendency to withdraw from the world, and each time she blamed herself. When she wrote the foregoing lines, she was pregnant with her daughter Elise, who was born on April 25, 1843, at a time when her husband was again working on a large-scale project, the oratorio Das Paradies und die Peri (Paradise and the Peri) op. 50. In the process he was approaching his unspoken goal of drawing on all the relevant musical genres while continuing to operate within the classical tradition. And in this he was successful. During his own lifetime, this full-length work was to be his most popular composition after the B-flat Major Symphony. In April 1848 he was even able to note in his diary: “Time of great excitement—the Peri in New York!”26
Back in April 1843, the Schumanns received an unexpected visit from Wagner, who was accompanied by the famous soprano Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient and who, after his lean years in Paris, was keen to establish himself in Saxony, not least by ingratiating himself with the editor of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. Writing in his autobiography, Wagner recalled his years in Dresden with his antithetical opposite: “We met from time to time while out walking, and to the extent that it was possible to engage in any kind of conversation with this singularly taciturn man, we exchanged views on many a subject of musical interest.”27 Some years later, Schumann reported on a “chance encounter” with Wagner in the Great Park in Dresden: “He has a tremendous gift of gab and is full of oppressive ideas; it’s impossible to listen to him for long.”28 In this respect Clara effortlessly outdid her husband: Wagner, she wrote, “never stops talking about himself, he’s insufferably arrogant and is for ever laughing in that lachrymose tone of his.”29
Paradise and the Peri received its first performance in Leipzig on December 4, 1843. The occasion also marked Schumann’s successful debut as a conductor. Although there seem to have been complaints about his excessive laissez-faire attitude during the rehearsals, he would have been in full control of the situation where his own music was concerned. In any event, a performance in the Dresden opera house only three weeks later, again under Schumann’s direction, garnered much praise from the local press.
The Dresden performance of Paradise and the Peri brought with it a conciliatory letter from Friedrich Wieck, who had in the meantime moved to the city:
Dear Schumann,
Tempora mutantur et nos mutamur in eis [Times change, and we ourselves change with them]. We can no longer stand apart in the eyes of Clara and the world. You too are now a family man—need I say more? [. . .] It is with joy that your father awaits you in Dresden, Friedrich Wieck.30
They met during the Christmas holidays, thereafter maintaining a respectful distance, a development Clara welcomed with considerable relief, while Schumann himself preferred to remain aloof, bestirring himself only to report on his own successes.
One such success was a four-month visit to Russia on which the Schumanns set out in January 1844. Their two infant daughters, Marie and Elise, spent the period in Schneeberg with Schumann’s brother Carl and his wife, Pauline. They traveled to Berlin by train, and from there they took the mail coach to the Baltic resorts which, far from being backward and provincial, were notable centers of music. Even in Königsberg (modern Kaliningrad), where Clara gave two concerts, Schumann was able to report on various points of interest in his diary.
It is also worth mentioning in passing that it was in Königsberg that Wagner had landed eight years earlier as the husband of the popular actress Minna Planer, only for his professional career to founder. Recently married, he and his wife had so many violent scenes that she returned to her native Germany in the company of an admirer called Dietrich. In the light of such high drama, the excitements in the Schumanns’ lives seem relatively harmless.
The Schumanns left Königsberg and headed for the Baltic and Russia, at which point their journey acquired an air of improvisation, the only certainty being that they had arrived in the middle of a grim Russian winter. How good it would have been if an agent had been waiting to greet them in every new town or city, guaranteeing in advance that all doors were open to them and that they would be performing to full houses! By this date, the internationally celebrated, cosmopolitan figure of Mendelssohn had long since managed to ensure that he was everywhere welcomed with open arms, whereas it was only in exceptional cases that advance preparations had been made for the Schumanns. Arrangements formerly made by Wieck now had to be made by Clara since her husband was repeatedly overcome by misgivings and was largely ineffectual as an organizer.
In spite of all this, he took a lively interest in the landscape and population and in local culture and history, so much so, indeed, that initially at least he kept a travel diary. Here are the entries for February 5 and 6, 1844:
4 in the morning from Tilsit [modern Sovetsk] by post horses—crossing the [frozen] Neman somewhat frightening—Russian border—border Cossack with pistol—Tauroggen [modern Tauragė]—Russian faces, Jews, life on sledges—customs director von Wilken—extremely polite treatment and rapid dispatch—Kresslowski [an official], clever fellow in a simple coat—excellent inn—leave at 10 with the Russian diligence [a public stagecoach]—diligence very comfortable inside—deep snow & slow progress—terrible lunch—extremely tedious & tiring journey—Lithuanian villages—roads very busy—mostly Jews—long caravans of one-horse carriages, 3 in the morning, traveling to Mitau [modern Jelgava]—Mitau, capital of Courland—5 in the morning, the weather even colder—arrival at Riga—life on the Dvina—magnificent—terrible jostling & shouting in the streets—post—more poor arrangements, no one takes any trouble over visitors from abroad—looking for somewhere to stay—terrible room in the St. Petersburg [Hotel]. Lutzau [a cellist] helps us—returned to the Hôtel de Londres—call on Julius Behrens [a Riga businessman, pianist, and composer]—excellent cigars—filthy guesthouse.31
It is not hard to imagine that the Schumanns’ social contacts would have involved a similarly unpredictable and emotionally draining mixture of friendliness and uncouthness, interesting conversations and “intolerable harassment.”32 Meanwhile Clara was drumming up trade on good and bad pianos in shabby and genteel salons, hoping only that her actual concerts wou
ld be a success.
Schumann had fallen behindhand with his plans to complete Paradise and the Peri, with the result that although their Russian trip had been planned for some time, they were late in setting out and by the time they reached St. Petersburg and Moscow, other virtuosos had already stolen a march on them, leaving local audiences almost oversated. And yet there were also many triumphs and honors to offset the half-filled halls—the latter a problem that every artist has to face. In St. Petersburg Clara appeared at four major concerts and also took part in soirées and evenings of piano quartets with some of the celebrities on the local musical scene, including counts Mateusz and Michał Wielhorski and the director of the imperial court chapel choir, Aleksey Fyodorovich L’vov.
Clara also played for the tsarina in the Winter Palace and was made an honorary member of the St. Petersburg Philharmonic Society, leaving Schumann—understandably—feeling superfluous; all these aristocrats, generals, diplomats, statesmen, and middle-class property owners wanted Clara as the centerpiece of their salons and soirées, leaving Schumann to hover inconspicuously in the background. By now his wife was so used to his bouts of ill humor that they left her unaffected, although there were also occasions of which she sought to play a more conciliatory role, not only performing some of his piano pieces but also lending luster to a performance of his Piano Quintet op. 44. And Schumann himself was able to conduct a performance of his First Symphony at a soirée at the Wielhorksi Palace, which he later described as “a true cathedral of art.”33
The couple’s subsequent visit to Moscow was less brilliant, not least because the concert season was almost over. Even so, Schumann was fascinated by the city, especially the Kremlin, where the Tsar Bell in particular caught his imagination. Nearly twenty feet high, it is thought to be the biggest bell in the world but was so badly damaged by fire while being cast in 1737 that for almost a century it was left in its mold and not removed until 1836, eight years before the Schumanns’ visit. The damaged bell was then placed on a plinth on which it still stands in the Kremlin, at its base a fragment the height of a man that has broken off from its mantle.
Fascinated by this tale, Schumann wrote a long poem in largely unrhymed octosyllabic verse titled “The Bell of Ivan Veliki,” describing how a famous bell-caster was hoist by the petard of his own vanity when he tried to cast a bell of unprecedented size and beauty for the Ivan Veliki Belfry. The poem’s central section tells of the failed attempt to free the bell from its mold:
Nun ist’s vollbracht, die Form gefüllt,
Nun kühle sich die gähr’nde Masse,
Die Bilder, die der Künstler schuf
In reiner Treue aufzunehmen.
Und bald in allvereinter Kraft
Rühr’n sich die Hände, Flaschenzug
Und Hebel greifen ineinander.
Von ihrer Stelle, daß sie schwebe,
Die ries’ge Glocke fort zu rücken.
Nun hebt sie sich, der Knopf zuerst
Mit schön gewund’nen Tragebändern—
Doch um des Meisters Sinne dunkelt’s,
Das Erz, es deckt ein fahles Grau
Und halb erkenntlich springen die
Gebilde auf der Fläche vor,
Und nun zur Hälfte in die Höh’
Die Glocke weiter aufgezogen—
Ganz nahe des Erlösers Bild.
Es klafft ein Sprung, es fehlt ein Stück,
Und unbeweglich in der Tiefe
Ein Rest bleibt stehn—Entsetzen
Faßt rings das Volk und faßt den Meister.
Und wie er trauernd seine Augen
Abwendet, das Gesicht verhüllt,
Das Schreckliche nicht mehr zu schau’n—
Die Mutter, die im stummen Schmerz
Das todtgeborne Kind betrachtet,
Ihr Antlitz mag nicht schmerzensvoller sein—
Da drängt ein Mann sich im Talar
Zu ihm und spricht:
Du hast versucht, was du nicht solltest,
Mit Heil’gem nied’ren Sinn beschönt:
Nicht Gott ist’s, dem du dienen wolltest,
Der Eitelkeit hast du gefrönt:
So sei dein Nam’ fortan verhöhnt,
Du, tausend And’ren gleich vergessen.
Soll Dir ein Werk mit Gott gelingen,
Lern’ erst zur Demuth dich bezwingen.
Und schweigend hört’s der Künstler an,
Und wie die Menge sich verlor,
Verlor er mit sich im Gedränge.34
[It’s finished now, the mold is filled,/Now let the yeasting liquid cool/And reproduce the pictures that/The artist made so true to life./And then with one accord all hands/Bestir themselves, and pulley blocks/And levers are engaged to hoist/The massive bell and lift it up/Until it seems to float in space./And now it rises up, the top/Emerges first, beribboned—but/The master’s senses start to reel:/The metal’s veiled in pallid gray,/The letters on the surface seem/Inchoate and too vague to read./By now the bell is raised to half/Its massive height and rests quite close/To where our Savior’s likeness hangs./A crack appears, a piece falls off,/A section, motionless, remains/Embedded in the mold. Alarm/Transfixes all, the Master too./And as he turns his eyes away/In sadness, covering his face,/The better to avoid the sight—/No mother racked by silent grief/As she beholds her stillborn child/Could be as wrought by pain as he—/A robèd figure’s forced his way/To him and speaks the words:/“You tried to do what no man ought—/It was with baseness that you sought/To justify a sacred thought./It was not God you served but naught/Save your own vanity. And so/Your name shall henceforth be accursed,/Like countless others that you know./If God shall bless your work, then first/You have to learn humility.”/The artist silently gave ear,/And as the crowd dispersed, he too/Was lost among the milling throng.]
It is possible that Schumann saw this poem as the basis of a future composition, for in May 1844 we find him writing to his father-in-law: “For the present, a poetic greeting from Moscow—I don’t trust myself to hand it to you in person. It is hidden music as there was no time or leisure for composition.”35 And until such time as new material presents itself, we may not go far wrong in assuming that Schumann found the hubris motif not in Russian legends but in his own imagination.
In any event, the subject fascinated him to such an extent that while he was in Moscow he also wrote a poem about Napoleon’s hubristic plan to conquer Russia. A few years later he explored an identical theme in his choral ballad Das Glück von Edenhall (The good fortune of Edenhall) op. 143, based on a poem by Ludwig Uhland. On this occasion the starting point was not a cracked bell but a priceless piece of glass on which the weal and woe of an aristocratic family hangs. In a fit of high spirits, the young lord breaks it, and with that his rule comes to an end.
The events just described are among the minor miracles in Schumann’s life and works: although he often felt unwell in Moscow and suffered attacks of dizziness that sometimes left him unable to see, he was fond of walking in the grounds of the Kremlin and would “return home utterly enchanted.”36 He turned the tale of the Tsar Bell into a legend about human hubris, a theme he also explored with reference to Napoleon. Although he did not work straightaway on the music that was “hidden” in his poem, he returned to the subject nine years later in the political context of the revolutions of 1848. Now everything came together—panic attacks and the thrill of discovery, crises of self-esteem and creative enthusiasm, feelings of horror and the power of the imagination, the fear of hubris and confidence in his own artistic abilities. What finally emerged was a work independent of its prehistory and yet permeated by that same past history.
In Moscow, the Schumanns attended a wearisomely lengthy Russian Orthodox service with “terrible singing.”37 Clara also played at an orphanage, “where everything was immaculate.”38 They then returned to St. Petersburg, where Schumann noted in his marriage diary on a rainy day in May:
In the morning we went to the Zoological Museum with Madame Henselt and Doctor Schulz. We
got into a cab, but Madame Henselt and Dr. Schulz preferred to cross the Neva by boat, when they were surprised by a terrible downpour. We met up again at the Museum.39
This diary entry makes the museum visit sound harmless, but it appears from a letter that the aforementioned Dr. Georg von Schulz wrote to his mother that behind it lay a miniature drama:
Our tour of the city ended, unfortunately, on a discordant note. I had suggested that we might visit the imperial vault in the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul, but Schumann could not be persuaded by his wife’s encouragements and entreaties to climb into the little boat that was to take us across the Neva to the island fortress. And so we had to abandon the idea. The most remarkable thing of all was that from then on Schumann became monosyllabic and very bad-tempered. As a doctor I was strangely moved by this expression of an almost morbid fear.40
From St. Petersburg they traveled by steamship to Swinemünde (modern Świnoujście), then by mail coach to Leipzig and finally went to collect their children in Schneeberg. In his letter thanking his brother, Schumann wrote from Leipzig on June 3, 1844:
Marie kept wanting to return “to Schneeberg;” she really didn’t seem to know where she actually lived. Here the children were received in triumph by half the Inselstraße; they had decorated their little desk with flowers and presents; the little ones enjoyed themselves enormously, just as everyone was delighted by them, by their cheerful and attractive appearance and behavior.41
At the beginning of 1844 Schumann left his study in Leipzig only with great reluctance, yet writing retrospectively about his trip to Russia, he was able to describe it as “not without its exertions, but interesting from start to finish.”42 After all, he had managed to make a virtue of a necessity and had mobilized his interest in the country’s history and people. On one occasion, he even toyed with the idea of settling in Moscow. He may well have recalled this idea when, on his return to Leipzig, he took out his pencil sketch of the Kremlin. It is his only surviving drawing outside his travel diaries.