by Martin Geck
Although the C Major Symphony positively flaunts the effort that has gone into it and—to the extent that the fanfare motif heard at the start of the symphony may be said to hold its own right through to the final movement—may be regarded as a work in which that final movement is the goal toward which the symphony as a whole aspires, there are no rigorous motific and thematic processes in the sense in which Beethoven understood that term. Instead, Schumann seems repeatedly to become lost in the dense undergrowth of his musical textures, ultimately succeeding in escaping from them only by dint of an act of violence that consists in the fact that in the final movement it is not Schumann who triumphs, but Beethoven. As in the C Major Piano Fantasy op. 17, Beethoven appears here in the form of the theme “Nimm sie hin denn, diese Lieder,” which, for Peter Gülke, represents an “explicit musical presentation” of the symphony to Clara and at the same time an astonishing act of “breaking free from all the existing rules.”19
The fact that in the course of the final movement Schumann is by no means sparing in his repeats of his Beethoven reminiscence need not diminish the work in our eyes. Even the “sounds of anguish” for which he cites the Adagio with its “melancholic bassoon”20 can be accommodated within a symphony whose home key is for long periods obscured so that only in the course of the final movement does the work strike the note of optimism traditionally associated with the key of C major. (It may be added parenthetically that even after his conversion to the Wagnerian cause, Hans von Bülow still claimed that whenever he heard the aforementioned Adagio he wanted to “sink to his knees in prayer.”21)
More problematical is the fact that the musical language is excessively coded. The C Major Symphony evokes not only Beethoven but Bach, too, for in the second movement’s second trio, Schumann uses the B–A–C–H motif, while the Adagio includes a reminiscence of the Trio Sonata from the Musical Offering, to say nothing of a possible echo of Haydn in the opening fanfare motif. When combined with the movement’s motific density, such foreign allusions are likely to confuse impartial listeners who may suspect that such references are present but be unable to identify them. And this problem is exacerbated by the fact that the melodic writing does not have the vividness and verve that listeners would admire only a few years later in the Rhenish Symphony. Of course, none of this should prevent us from taking the work seriously; not only did the composer have to struggle hard to create it, but it was wrung, so to speak, from the musico-aesthetic discourse of the time. The question that was in the air in the years leading up to the revolution of March 1848 also left its mark on the C Major Symphony: “Should the old head-in-the-clouds romanticism be allowed to continue or should it finally be replaced by a neoclassicism that was more open to the world?”22
On the occasion of a performance in Dresden, Schumann expressed his doubts that “the symphony could ever please anyone.”23 At this date he was still capable of ironically tinged self-doubts, but he became seriously angry when the young Adolf Schubring—later to become a critic and a friend of Brahms—felt impelled to advise Schumann to renounce “romanticism” and write music that was “clear and understandable to all.” He was so annoyed that—exceptionally—he lost his temper: “Is it not clear to you from my music that I am interested in more than simply amusing children and amateurs? As if there were only one or two forms into which all intellectual ideas must fit—as if the thought does not create its own particular form of its very own accord?”24
Intermezzo VI
In modo d’una marcia
In June 1848, Liszt turned up unexpectedly in Dresden and let it be known that he would be calling on the Schumanns. Unfortunately his visit caused something of an incident when he arrived two hours late, by which time the chamber music that had been arranged in his honor and that included a performance of Beethoven’s Piano Trio in D Major op. 70, no. 1 (Ghost) was almost over. Although Liszt professed to like Schumann’s new Piano Trio op. 63, which was presumably performed from the manuscript parts, he is said to have found the Piano Quintet op. 44 of some years earlier too “leipzigerisch”—too typical of the city of Leipzig. And when he then had the effrontery to champion Meyerbeer at the expense of Mendelssohn—the latter had been in his grave for less than eight months—Schumann seized him by the shoulders in a state of some agitation: “Meyerbeer is a pygmy next to Mendelssohn, who as an artist worked not just in Leipzig but for the whole world, and Liszt would do better to hold his tongue”—or so we read in Clara’s diary.1
Liszt sought to play down the matter and in a subsequent conversation with Wagner tried to see the funny side of it, but Schumann had been goaded beyond reason, and a year later, when Liszt expressed an interest in the Scenes from Goethe’s Faust on which Schumann was currently working, the latter wrote to him, barely concealing his sarcasm:
But, my dear friend, don’t you think you’ll find the piece too “leipzigerisch”? Or do you regard L[eipzig] as a miniature Paris where something might yet be achieved? But to be serious—I really would have expected someone who knows so many of my compositions to have acted differently and not to have passed judgment, lock, stock, and barrel, on an entire artist’s life. If you were to look at my compositions in more detail, you would find a fair variety of views in them, just as I have always tried to express something different in each of my compositions—and not just in terms of their form.2
The autograph of the opening bars of the second movement (Un poco largamente. In modo d’una marcia) of the Piano Quintet in E-flat Major op. 44 (1842). (Photograph courtesy of the University and Regional Library, Bonn.)
What exactly was at stake here? This was a time when Liszt was trying to put behind him his career as a pianist and was teeming with ideas for symphonic poems, hoping to create a kind of music that would reflect “society’s spirit and sentiments, its lives and ideals.”3 This society—and here it is the Saint-Simonian and popular educator we hear speaking—should aspire to a higher form of existence, which it could do by means of an art that amounted to more than mere empty virtuosity on the one hand and formal games on the other but which should seek to convey ideas of genuine substance. Against this background—and in spite of a certain sympathy with its representatives—he was bound to see the “Leipzig school” of composers like Mendelssohn and Schumann as occupying an ivory tower: art for art’s sake with a tendency toward the conventional. Liszt was enough of a musician to find Schumann’s music attractive, but he expected more than that.
As a result, Liszt may have been critical of the fact that at the chamber recital at the Schumanns’ house, the formal exercise of the Piano Trio op. 63 was immediately followed by a similar exercise in the guise of the Piano Quintet, which operates along identically predictable lines—the opening Allegro brillante, for example, is cast in regular first-movement sonata form, its exposition featuring a typical cantabile theme on the dominant that takes its textbook place on the tonic in the recapitulation. And there is a development section between the exposition and recapitulation. In Liszt’s eyes this itself was reactionary in the extreme and, more particularly, typical of Schumann’s embarrassment at having to “say something specific” in such a passage. (Mahler was later to say exactly the same about the development sections of both Mendelssohn and Schumann.)
If we also recall that the last thing that Liszt heard ringing in his ears was the double fugue with which Schumann ends the final movement of his piano quintet, it becomes easy to understand his reaction. At the same time, Schumann was right to be annoyed. Not only did he not see a neoclassical command of formal structures as regressive, he regarded such a device as a compositional gain. As we have already noted, he had informed his colleague Carl Koßmaly on May 5, 1843, four months after the piano quintet received its first performance at a Gewandhaus concert: “Man and musician have always sought to express themselves simultaneously with me, and I expect that it is exactly the same now, when I have, of course, learned to exercise greater control in my art.”
Implicit in thi
s remark is the conviction that even though Schumann’s chamber music may strike a more neoclassical note than his early piano music or his songs, this does not mean that it is not equally pervaded by personal experience. As our brief glance at his string quartets should have indicated, not only is the formal organization of these chamber works innocent of all neoclassical glibness—at least as soon as we examine the original details of their internal structure—but many of these details are eloquent in a way that goes far beyond all generalized emotions. Even Donald Francis Tovey, a veteran of music criticism, wrote of this work that “every note tells, and the instruments are vividly characterized in spite of the preponderance of the pianoforte throughout.”4
Schumann’s constant quest for striking motifs emerges with particular force from a letter that he addressed to Mendelssohn on September 20, 1845:
Dear Mendelssohn,
When we recently said our goodbyes to each other, you really must have thought me insane for paying you such a hideous compliment, especially after you had just played me your charming song in E and were bound to assume that it was to this song that I was referring. What I meant by this and by the “Eichendorff” was the one in D minor . It seemed to come to me as from an ancient chronicle, when the town players announced the tournament and the knights refused to appear and the musicians became impatient and so on. Tell me, am I missing the point? Or did you really have something like that before your mind’s eye?5
Schumann’s question was posed against the following background. Mendelssohn had been a guest of the Schumanns in Dresden the previous month and had played one of his Songs Without Words in E Major—presumably the “Cradle Song” op. 67, no. 6—in addition to the “Horseman’s Song” in D minor. Both were still unpublished at this date. Schumann seems to have been particularly taken by the “Horseman’s Song” and to have thought of Eichendorff and of a medieval scene. The eight-note motif that he jotted down in his letter evidently conjured up these associations for him in a particularly impressive manner.
It is interesting that Schumann did not quote the opening of the “Horseman’s Song,” even though he may still have had this in his mind’s ear. What he noted down instead is a brief motif that could certainly be interpreted as a signal or horn call and that Schumann soon invested with a concrete meaning. This was his way of listening to music. And on this occasion he was so convinced by his own aural impression that he needed to know if the composer had had a similar image in mind.
But Mendelssohn could not be so easily coerced into offering a programmatical interpretation of his Songs Without Words: “If I love a piece of music,” he told Marc-André Souchay, his cousin by marriage,
then what it tells me is not ideas too vague to be put into words, but ideas that are too definite. If you ask me what I was thinking about in the case of individual numbers [i.e., in the Songs Without Words], I would have to say that it was the song exactly as it stands there. And if I had in mind a particular word or words when writing this or that piece, I do not care to tell anyone what it was because only the song itself can say the same thing to one person as it does to another and awaken the same feeling in both of them—a feeling that is not, however, expressed by the same words.5
From this point of view, Schumann’s question cannot have filled Mendelssohn with any great enthusiasm, even though he confirmed his correspondent’s association of ideas in his reply. Perhaps he was just being polite.
The two composers were not in fact very far apart in terms of their aesthetic principles, and yet their methods of composition differed on one essential point, a point that Schumann illustrated particularly clearly when he argued that every phrase in a piece of music was “eloquent.” It was a point on which he insisted to an extent that the strict adherents of “absolute” music found almost unsettling. A comparison between Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words and Schumann’s Kinderscenen makes this difference clear, for the Songs Without Words are dominated by a kind of uniform process to which the individual phrases conform. At the risk of sounding polemical, we could say that Mendelssohn speaks in generalities rather than specifics. For Schumann, the situation was very different. Whether we take “Dreaming” or “The Poet Speaks” from the Kinderscenen, every phrase, no matter how brief, is fully articulated, leading a life of its own and contributing something specific to the overall narrative context. The reader may care to recall the metrical patterns at the start of “Dreaming,” with their “deeply felt” sequence of 5/4, 3/4, 2/4, 2/4, and 4/4 time signatures. Mendelssohn would never have written anything like this.
This brings us back to Liszt’s reproach that Schumann’s works were all too typical of the Leipzig school and Schumann’s indignation at his comment. If the criticism had been directed at Mendelssohn, one might be inclined to accept it. But Schumann could rightly claim that in each of his compositions he had “brought something different to light—and not just in terms of its form.” And this is true not only of the work or of the movement as a whole but also of its individual details. From this point of view, we may take a closer look at the second movement of the Piano Quintet op. 44, which is marked “In modo d’una marcia” and is generally regarded as the heart of the work.
It is a funeral march and as such it has a number of prominent predecessors in the nineteenth century, including the slow movements of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony and of Chopin’s Piano Sonata op. 35, which struck Schumann—astonishingly—as exaggeratedly “somber” and even “repellent.”7 Also worth mentioning here is Mendelssohn’s Song Without Words op. 62, no. 3, which adopts the language of a funeral march and is traditionally referred to as such. A comparison between the funeral marches of Schumann and Mendelssohn offers us a good opportunity to draw a distinction between the Leipzig styles of them both.
As listeners, we are astonished first and foremost by the fact that Schumann’s march, which lasts around three and a half minutes in performance, is only a little longer than Mendelssohn’s, even though it contains substantially more information. Mendelssohn begins with a signal-like introduction, the triplet rhythm of which is already found in the Eroica, where it serves the same genre-specific function. The Song Without Words as a whole is divisible into three groups of 16 + 12 + 16 bars and comprises an introduction, a middle section and a slightly modified repeat of the introduction, A–B–A′. Although Mendelssohn could never be accused of schematicism, he remains in the home key of E minor, with only minor harmonic deviations. Metrically speaking, the work is clearly made up of symmetrical structures, each of which is 4 bars long, while it draws its melodic life from its opening theme.
The clear formal structure and memorable design of Mendelssohn’s “Funeral March” are typical of his Songs Without Words in general, ensuring that this particular piece was so popular in middle-class salons in the nineteenth century that Strindberg could assume a knowledge of it in his three-part drama To Damascus and use it as a leitmotif: scraps of the music are heard as the expression of a constant threat on street corners, at the doctor’s, in the hotel, on the open road, and so on.
Mendelssohn was successful in writing a genre piece, which, in spite of the initial stimulus of its rapid triplets, is essentially songlike in character. Within these narrow, self-imposed limits he avoids introducing anything unduly “personal.” The result is funeral music that maintains its sense of decorum, which is why it was also appropriate for it to be performed at his funeral service in Leipzig’s University Church. Could the march from the piano quintet have been played at Schumann’s obsequies?
Of course, it could have been played, but it would have honored an artist in whose works personal passion invariably triumphs over the pure genre piece. Not that genre-like elements are missing from Schumann, for even the march in the piano quintet draws its strength above all from its ability to tap into our preconceptions of the archetypal funeral march. And its gestural weight is further underlined by the fact that the march disappears for a time before returning as the “unchangeable
.” Writers on the theory of musical form speak dispassionately here of a rondo in A–B–A–C–B–A form. But for Schumann, this form has a very specific function: the “shock” triggered by the march theme is something that can briefly be shaken off, but it cannot be exorcised for good.8
It would be wrong, therefore, to dismiss Schumann’s recourse to traditional rondo form as neoclassical and hence as “typical of Leipzig” in the sense intended by Liszt. But it is equally important to note that Schumann’s funeral march differs from those of Beethoven, Chopin, and Mendelssohn in that it does not speak the language of noble tragedy, a language that acquires a certain bitterness, if at all, through the piercing accents in the accompanying voices. Rather, there is something hesitant even about the melodic writing, investing it with a quality that is hard to associate with sublime grief or with the memory of a hero. We are reminded instead of a funeral procession whose swaying figures advance only with some difficulty. Symptomatic of this is the small step out of line descending to the subdominant at the end of the opening phrase and robbing the melodic line of its straightforwardness from the very outset.