by Martin Geck
Meanwhile Schumann had not only made The Well-Tempered Clavier his constant companion, he also had written out The Art of Fugue and studied The Musical Offering. He was also familiar, of course, with Mendelssohn’s piano fugues, which he had praised in highly poetical terms in his Neue Zeitschrift, only to dismiss them in his marriage diary a few years later as “impoverished” in comparison to those of Bach.20 Having acquired a copy of Cherubini’s Cours de contrepoint et de fugue and rented a pedal-board, he studied fugue technique with Clara, then fired off a whole series of works. In April and May 1845, for example, he completed six Studies for the Pedal Pianoforte op. 56, four (noncontrapuntal) Sketches for the Pedal Pianoforte op. 58, and Six Fugues on the Name BACH for Organ or Pianoforte with Pedal op. 60.
We would not be doing their creator an injustice by seeing these studies first and foremost as a successful attempt at self-assurance on Schumann’s part: he was able to function as a composer and could invent things “in his head,” with the result that he was not dependent on ideas that might or might not strike him at the piano, depending on the mood of the moment. He himself regarded his op. 60 fugues as the work that was most likely to survive him. In any event, he was by no means alone in writing such works but was part of a wider trend, for fugues were not only test pieces in conservatories but also could be offered to connoisseurs, who would use them as a means of stocking up on their musical education. Finally, later composers as distinguished as Bizet and Debussy considered the op. 56 Studies worth arranging. Bizet made an arrangement of them for piano duet in 1872, while Debussy’s version for two pianos dates from 1891. In the present writer’s view, these works create a somewhat blurred impression when played on the organ—the original sound of the pedal pianoforte is better suited to making them seem interesting in terms of domestic music-making. Unfortunately, pedal pianofortes are nowadays hard to find.
One such instrument was standing in the Schumanns’ music room when they received a visit on August 29, 1846, from the then–twenty-year-old Eduard Hanslick—later to become famous as a music critic. In view of the halting conversation, their visitor was clearly relieved when Clara played something from the op. 56 Studies for the Pedal Pianoforte. Hanslick was then invited to accompany the family on a walk through the great park. Emil, who was only six months old and who did not survive infancy, was entrusted to a wet-nurse on this occasion. Hanslick latter recalled:
Clara went on ahead with the oldest girl, Schumann led the second one by the hand, and I took the youngest, Julie, an exceptionally beautiful child whom Schumann jokingly called my bride. [. . .] I was now able to observe him as a family man, contented and tender by turns. Here, too, however, he said but little, and yet his friendly, almost childlike eyes and smiling lips, which seemed pursed as if he were about to start whistling, struck me as uniquely and touchingly eloquent.21
That same evening, Schumann and Hanslick attended a performance of Tannhäuser under Wagner’s own direction, prompting Schumann to write to Mendelssohn: “I have to take back many of the things I said to you after reading through the score; from the stage everything looks very different. I was very affected by much of it.”22
In September 1846 the Schumanns moved to 26 Reitbahnstraße, and on November 5, Mendelssohn conducted the first performance of the still-unpublished C Major Symphony in the Gewandhaus. The Schumanns and their eldest children then traveled to Vienna, hoping the new symphony would prove to be the unqualified success there that it had failed to be in Leipzig—a success necessary if Schumann was to be restored to an even keel.
Events conspired against him, and the performances of the piano concerto and C Major Symphony, both of which Schumann conducted himself, encountered little response. Even Clara’s own recitals were only moderately successful, for she apparently played “pieces that were too good and that the audience didn’t understand.”23 Her diary entry for Christmas Eve strikes a correspondingly despondent note:
We lit a tree and gave the children a few trifles, but Robert and I were unable to give each other presents as we’d earned nothing whatsoever! In my heart of hearts I was very sad, it was the first Christmas when I’d not been able to give my dear Robert any pleasure but had brought him only unhappiness.24
Clara’s final concert in Vienna featured two very demanding pieces: Beethoven’s Appassionata Sonata and her own arrangement of Bach’s Organ Prelude in A Minor. Fortunately, it was sold out and proved sufficiently profitable for the couple to return to Dresden with a net profit of three hundred thalers. Even so, their pleasure was marred by the fact that they owed it above all to Jenny Lind, who with her usual kindness had agreed to share the platform at Clara’s concert, prompting the latter to note in her diary: “I could not resist the most embittered feeling that a single song by Lind achieved more than I could ever do with all my playing.”25 Otherwise, the couple’s contacts with the “divine” Jenny Lind were a source of unalloyed delight both artistically and personally; how good it was that in spite of all the pressure under which they always placed themselves, they could still enthuse about others!
They had also enthused about Mendelssohn, whose premature death in November 1847 was a bitter blow for them both. After all, they could hardly have found a more affable patron. As a composer, too, Schumann saw Mendelssohn as a great model. That his admiration could also give rise to self-doubt is clear from his work in the field of the piano trio, a genre to which Mendelssohn had made two important contributions in the form of his opp. 49 and 66, both of which had set such high standards that Schumann struggled to match them.
During his “chamber music year,” 1842, he had, it is true, written four movements for piano, violin, and cello, but these struck him as so untypical of the medium of the piano trio that it was not until eight years later that he published them under the noncommittal title of Fantasy Pieces. In 1847 he wrote two “proper” trios in D Minor op. 63 and F Major op. 80. In terms of the design and sequence of their movements, Schumann produced some extremely solid work here, even if, for some listeners, he indulged in excessively complex polyphonic procedures. But equally striking is the fact that for the first time in his chamber output he used German performance markings, which he did for a very good reason.
The movements of the first trio are headed “Mit Leidenschaft und Energie” (With passion and resolve), “Lebhaft, doch nicht zu rasch” (Lively, but not too fast), “Langsam, mit inniger Empfindung” (Slow, with heartfelt emotion), and “Mit Feuer” (With fire). As such, they are an appeal to performers and listeners alike not to be so distracted by the work’s elaborate artistry that they lose sight of the fact that the composer is speaking through the voices of a Florestan and a Eusebius, “as in olden times.” The way in which the differing elements of polyphonic procedures and eloquent emotionality can be intertwined is well illustrated by bars 11–20 in the slow movement, which is cast in the form of a set of variations. In the first variation the cello leads us deep inside a style of writing which even before had been metrically and harmonically complex but which now acquires an almost impenetrable opaqueness. Of course, even this music “sounds,” yet it tells not of neoclassical structures but of “rare states of mind,” and it already reveals some of the extremism of modern avant-garde music. It is striking that Schumann did not repeat this episode when taking up the opening section but ended the movement in a bright A major. Here we see an example of his sense of form, which never allowed him to lose his way completely. As such, this may warn us against thinking that music can be interpreted as a literal record of a composer’s state of mind.
When Hiller moved to Düsseldorf at the end of 1847, Schumann inherited the Dresden Liedertafel and immediately devoted all his energies to it. It was for this organization that he wrote his Three Songs for Male-Voice Choir op. 62 to words by Eichendorff, Rückert, and Klopstock: “Der Eidgenossen Nachtwache” (The confederates’ night-watch), “Freiheitslied” (Freedom song), and “Schlachtgesang” (Battle song). And he expended considerable eff
ort on finding a publisher who would bring out these songs “as a nice Christmas present for Prince Metternich”—the universally hated representative of the reactionary League of Princes that was an increasing focus of anger on the eve of the bourgeois revolution for which Schumann, too, could hardly wait. In particular the Eichendorff setting, which tells of “the victories of free old Switzerland,” could not be “better suited to present conditions” but must “be published without delay,” if it was to have any effect.26
In point of fact it was not until February 1848 that these songs finally appeared in print, by which time Schumann’s housekeeping book was reporting on “terrible events,” “tremendous political agitation,” “street fighting,” and so on.27 Schumann was in fact initially shocked by this violent turn of events, whereas Clara quickly made it clear where her loyalties lay. Unlike Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, a singer whom she greatly admired, she did not—it is true—call on her fellow citizens to march on the Dresden Castle during the May uprising in 1849, but a diary entry of March 13, 1848, reads, “In the evening the most dreadful news from Berlin, the king refuses to yield, the people are fighting terribly with the military.” And a few days later: “Over 1,000 people are said to have been killed, what must a king like that have on his conscience!” Clara was an ardent champion of the freedom of the press, so that following an argument with a woman from Berlin we find her confiding in her diary: “It is sad to see how few genuinely liberal people there are among the educated classes.” And although the Schumanns were on friendly terms with the Dresden artist Julius Hübner, their visits to the Hübner household were by no means uncontentious: “I called on Madame Hübner and had a regular row with her—about politics, would you believe it! [. . .] These people are not in the least bit liberal in their beliefs.”28
Schumann was by no means inactive throughout this period but wrote a series of freedom songs whose political tendencies were plain to see. They would, he hoped, be performed in public by male-voice choirs in Dresden: “Zu den Waffen” (To arms), “Schwarz-Rot-Gold” (Black, red, and gold), and “Deutscher Freiheitsgesang” (German freedom song).29 In any rate, he gave up the directorship of his Liedertafel after barely a year, as he found “too little real musical ambition” among its members: “And when I’ve spent the whole day making music on my own, these endless six-four chords of the male-voice choral style are really not to my liking.”30
He preferred to be drawn into conversation with Wagner. On January 20, 1848, for example, his diary entry reads: “1.45 in the morning a little boy”—this is all he has to say on the subject of the birth of his son Ludwig, after which he continues with an account of the rest of the day’s events: “In the morning to Rietschel’s studio—bust of Mendelssohn—in the afternoon R. Wagner called on me.”31 Entries for May and June 1848 include the following: “Wagner’s Lohengrin,” “Saw Wagner in the morning—his theater republic,” “Visit from Wagner—his political poem,” “R. Wagner’s political coup.”32 We may assume that Schumann would have been astonished at Wagner’s revolutionary views as retailed to him in person or gleaned from the pages of local newspapers, which carried reports on essays and poems with titles such as “Draft for the Organization of a German National Theater for the Kingdom of Saxony,” “Greetings from Saxony to the Viennese,” and “How Do Republican Aspirations Stand in Relation to the Monarchy?”
Although Schumann would have followed all these events with interest and presumably even with sympathy, he was not someone who carried on as a revolutionary. Even so, he championed music that was “rooted in the present”—and not just in the form of pithy male-voice choruses. Rather, he toyed with the idea of a subject such as “The German Peasants’ War” and he set an Advent Song op. 71, which starts with the words “Your king comes in lowly garments.” Within the contemporary political context these words could be inflammatory, and that is how they were intended. While the king of Prussia had contemptuously rejected the crown that had been offered to him by his people within the framework of a constitutional monarchy, the biblical Jesus in Rückert’s hymn was “a powerful ruler with no armies” and a “prince of peace of great power.”
Even the Album für die Jugend (Album for young people) op. 68 for piano that Schumann wrote in the fall of 1848 reflected the spirit of the times. If the Kinderscenen of 1838 had been the “reflections of an older man for older people,” the new album—which was successful from the very outset—tended to contain “prefigurations, presentiments, future states for younger people.”33 In this respect, Schumann was no backward-looking romantic keen to glorify childhood; rather, he was a father who had taken a keen interest in his children’s everyday lives: “I wrote the first pieces in the album for our eldest child on her birthday, and the others were gradually added afterwards.”34
“Der kleine Morgenwanderer” (Little morning wanderer), no. 17, refers to Marie’s first day at school; “Ein Stückchen” (A little piece), no. 5, was originally called “Nach vollbrachter Schularbeit” (On completing one’s homework); and “Erster Verlust” (literally, “First loss,” but more usually translated as “First sorrow”), no. 16, was initially known as “Kinder-Unglück” (Children’s unhappiness), an allusion to the death of a bird of which the children had been very fond but which their father had killed by feeding it too many bone-marrow dumplings. The “Reminiscence” of Mendelssohn’s death was written in the style of Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words and deserves its place in the collection, at no. 28, because Mendelssohn was Marie Schumann’s godfather.35
The poetic element is never eclipsed by didactic concerns, although it is no longer poetry for adults but for children. Any reader who grew up playing “Der fröhliche Landmann” (The happy farmer) will recall not so much the off-beat eighth notes in the right hand that make the piece sound uncannily like a study as the rollicking melodic line that leads with such feeling to the diminished seventh at the double bar line and then proceeds to repeat the melodic line with an added third: this is enough for a child to enter another world, if only for a few brief moments.
The Waldszenen (Forest scenes) op. 82 for piano that Schumann wrote during the winter of 1848–49 picks up where the Album für die Jugend left off. True, these beautiful and expressive pieces are intended for adults, and yet here, too, a realistic element is clearly identifiable: there are no reflections of an inner fantasy world but in its place a loving engagement with nature. The nine numbers are headed “Eintritt” (Entrance), “Jäger auf der Lauer” (Hunter lying in wait), “Einsame Blumen” (Solitary flowers), “Verrufene Stelle” (Place of ill repute), “Freundliche Landschaft” (Friendly landscape), “Herberge” (Shelter), “Vogel als Prophet” (Bird as prophet), “Jagdlied” (Hunting song), and “Abschied” (Farewell). None of them is illustrative in character but for the most part is an example of highly reflective musical poetry. Although we know that at the time he was working on these pieces Schumann had numerous paintings of woodland scenes hanging in his apartment, the music goes far beyond a mere depiction of nature. “Verrufene Stelle,” for example, is inspired by Hebbel’s poem “Böser Ort” (An evil place), which is permeated by somber symbolism, and the work that Schumann was moved to write is reminiscent, in its cryptic way, of Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier.
Of course, a political impulse did not prevent Schumann from continuing to work on large-scale compositions during 1848, compositions which even less than those just mentioned can be reduced to their contemporary context. Two of them—Genoveva and Manfred—will be dealt with in Intermezzos VII and IX, leaving us in the present chapter to examine only the Scenes from Goethe’s Faust.
Schumann had considered writing an opera on the subject of Faust as early as 1840, but it was during his visit to Russia in 1844 that he began to sketch an oratorio36 based on the final scene from part 2 of Goethe’s play. Conceived under the title “Faust’s Transfiguration,” it was designed as a setting of the entire final scene, which takes place in a mountain gorge and runs from “
Waldung, sie schwankt heran” (Woods, hither wavering) to “Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan” (Eternal womanhood draws us on high). But then the project stagnated. On September 24, 1845, for example, Schumann wrote to Mendelssohn: “The scene from Faust is resting in a drawer of my desk; I’m really afraid of looking at it again. I was so moved by the sublime poetry of the ending that I felt emboldened to start work on it; but now I don’t know if I shall ever publish it.”37
But he was then indeed emboldened to complete “Faust’s Transfiguration,” and the scene received its first performance in Cosel’s Palace in Dresden on June 15, 1848, proving so successful that Schumann was encouraged to add two further sections during the time that remained to him in the city. The first was a group of three scenes from part 1 of Faust (“Scene in the Garden,” “Gretchen Before the Image of the Mater Dolorosa,” and “Scene in the Cathedral”), while the second comprised three scenes from part 2 (“Ariel: Sunrise,” “Midnight,” and “Faust’s Death”). In Düsseldorf, finally, Schumann added an overture. But it was not until after his death that all three parts were performed for the first time in the Gürzenich Hall in Cologne on January 14, 1862.
At the time, the work was regarded above all as an “educational oratorio” and as an attempt “to understand art through art.”38 That was also how Schumann himself saw it, although he also had to reckon on being criticized: “Why write music to such consummate poetry?”39 Certainly, he felt such profound respect for his hallowed source that in contradistinction to his usual practice he did not alter a single phrase but followed it so slavishly, word for word, that even Goethe’s strophic structure was of only secondary importance to him.