Robert Schumann

by Martin Geck

  Schumann and Wagner were the only nineteenth-century composers to underwrite their activities with a permanent series of reflections on the philosophy of art. By the early 1850s, Schumann had concrete reasons for doing so inasmuch as his works had become central to contemporary discourse on musical thinking. On the admittedly relatively small stage that was then seeking to raise the profile of German musical culture, the question was forever being asked: was Schumann the great hope for the future, or did he represent an “outmoded standpoint”? As we have already observed, even his successor as the editor of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik reproached Schumann for clinging to the past, by which he meant that against the background of the bourgeois revolution music could no longer muddle along as a separate, special art but must open itself up to the great questions of the day and in that way contribute to social renewal. In the political realm this process had failed with the violent suppression of the revolutions of 1848 and 1849, with the result that all hopes were now placed in the cultural “superstructure.” Progressive contemporaries banked on the idea of a utopian “total artwork” in which all desires and hopes would be subsumed, as in the symphonic poems of Liszt and the future music dramas of Wagner.

  The goals of the “realists” were less high-flown. Theirs was a movement promoted above all by the journal Die Grenzboten, which drew most of its support from literature and the visual arts while also influencing discussions in the field of music. Although there were lines of communication between Liszt and Wagner on the one hand and the partisans of Die Grenzboten on the other, the differences between the two factions were more striking. Whereas Wagner and Liszt had grand utopian ideas aimed at amelioration, the champions of realism, at least as far as its German variant were concerned, were satisfied with rather less than that. For them, it was enough if the arts reported positively on the present rather than trying to escape from the world by seeking refuge in a romantic past. This also allowed them to avoid any unduly harsh critique of prevailing conditions. The family paper Die Gartenlaube shared Die Grenzboten’s views and was initially progressive in tone. It was here, for example, that Berthold Auerbach’s Dorfgeschichten (Village stories) was published alongside reproductions of socio-critical genre scenes that were part of the repertory of Düsseldorf’s “realistic” school of painters at this time.

  With his lively interest in current affairs, Schumann was familiar with all of this. For him, it was partly living history, partly the actual present. In his youth he had championed romanticism, before sympathizing with the bourgeois revolution. He had spoken frequently to Liszt and Wagner and as a result he knew their own positions. He also met Auerbach on many occasions in Düsseldorf, and he was a regular visitor to the Düsseldorf studios of the city’s various painters. Now he had to define—or redefine—his own standpoint.

  On the occasion of the publication of his collected writings in 1854, Schumann was pleased to note that he had no reason to take back any of the views on musical aesthetics that he had expressed in his articles for his Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. He had remained the tone poet that he had always been. The only difference was that depending on the situation his tone poetry had tended more in the direction of romanticism, more in that of neoclassicism, and more toward the popularity of folk music—assuming that it did not embrace all three of them at once.

  Schumann did not reject the cultural and political programs of Wagner and Liszt, nor was he opposed in principle to new genres such as the musical drama and the symphonic poem. After all, he had struck out on the road to music drama with his opera Genoveva and had created a whole new genre with his choral ballads, while Manfred had brought new luster to the melodrama. And in a letter to Liszt he was sufficiently fair-minded to describe Wagner’s artistic creed, as expressed in Opera and Drama, as “very significant.”2 No, the dividing line lay elsewhere and affected one of Schumann’s most sacrosanct concerns, the creative act itself.

  Each of these three composers required an outside impetus to begin work on a new piece. But whereas Liszt in his symphonic poems and Wagner in his music dramas set out from lofty concepts such as myth, which they sought to present to their listeners’ emotions with the help of their music, Schumann drew his inspiration from whatever he found in his everyday life: “It can be a flower or a poem that is all the more spiritual in consequence, an instinctual drive in raw nature or a work of poetic awareness.” We have already quoted the continuation of this credo:

  I am affected by everything that happens in the world: politics, literature, people—I think about everything in my own way, and this then seeks to vent itself and find an outlet through music. That is why many of my compositions are so difficult to understand because they relate to remote interests, including even significant ones, and because everything remarkable that happens in this age moves me and I then have to express it in my music.3

  This marks the dividing line between the two approaches. Whereas music was a means to an end for Liszt and Wagner, it was the one and only truth for Schumann. Of course, it was “truth” as it appeared to the romantic artist within the confines of his own existence, whether in the form of his daily routine or of some particularly gripping reading matter. For Schumann it was an absolute sacrilege to use music in a rational way to implement ideas. When music and ideas met, it was ultimately music alone that had any permanence: it was divine and nondisposable, whereas ideas were mutable and a product of human agency. In February 1854, Schumann spelled out this point in a letter to the writer on music Richard Pohl, whose early admiration for the composer was later to turn to criticism: “Do not look for it [i.e., a politically correct definition of music] in philosophical expressions or in subtle distinctions. The fellow with an open mind and heartfelt emotions understands music more profoundly than the keen-thinking Kant.”4

  The German musicologist Bernhard Appel knows as much as anyone about Schumann. In conversation he once spoke of the composer’s “spiritual homelessness,” pointing out that although he was a baptized and confirmed Protestant, Schumann was not a committed Christian. But as the plentiful quotations contained in his “Poet’s Garden” indicate, Schumann certainly believed in art in a way that makes Liszt and Wagner seem positively godless—godless in the sense that they sought to steer the compositional process along rational lines in furtherance of their own desires and aims, whereas Schumann continued to believe that it was inspiration that guided his pen as a composer. And that was something godlike.

  Of course, these traces of metaphysics in Schumann’s thinking about music should not mislead us into imputing to him an understanding of “absolute” music of the kind propagated by Hanslick in his book Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (The beautiful in music), which first appeared in print at this time. Ideally Hanslick wanted a composer who produced “regularly beautiful bodies of sound” beyond all extra-musical insinuations. Listeners could assimilate these works only in the guise of “pure contemplation.” As such, Hanslick’s attitude comes suspiciously close to that of Plato’s theory of ideas—and Plato, as we know, was famously skeptical about music.5

  Schumann, by contrast, espoused a kind of “poetic realism”—to use Ulrich Tadday’s felicitous phrase.6 As we have already observed, Schumann saw music not as an art concerned with ideas that could be reduced to categories and concepts but as a “philosophy of the mind.”7 To that extent a work of music was based on the experience and communication of specific states of mind. Although these states of mind may have all manner of different causes, they are also produced by external stimuli and are therefore real. In other words, they are not due to the mere contemplation of pure ideas. Whereas this aspect of Schumann’s thinking flew in the face of Hanslick’s views on aesthetics, the category of the poetic also represented a repudiation of Wagner and Liszt. Realistically experienced states of mind were merely the starting point and were poeticized in the act of composition and raised from the personal to the universal. As Schumann put it in his letter to Pohl, this process resulted in “spiri
tual beauty in its most beautiful form.”8

  In short, Schumann’s music was not a continuation of his diary entries using the resources of music but an attempt to invest a diffusely experienced reality with meaning. His message to his fellow fighters might run as follows: “We experience the moments of pleasure and anxiety within the reality of this world more intensely than others and we do everything in our power to turn the water of our daily experiences into the wine of an artistic experience.” And Schumann felt particularly happy that at the end of his own creative life he had met the young Brahms, in whom he saw another such fellow fighter in an altogether ideal guise. Here was a member of the League of David who on the one hand knew how to write believable music based on profound personal experience and at the same time was able to channel the floodtide of sounds along such poetic lines that listeners could think only of music. Brahms was the true Messiah, whereas Liszt’s “Weimar gospels,” as Schumann ironically called them,9 proclaimed tidings that could just as well be peddled without the need for music.

  This does not mean that Schumann’s music was lacking in a political message. But it is a message that cannot be pinned down to a few republican marches and freedom songs. Rather, such a message was more general in character and only latently present. Moreover, Schumann was part of the radical change—or paradigm shift—that was marked in the political realm by the bourgeois revolution of 1848 and 1849. In his early piano works, he had tended to be against something—the juste milieu of the philistines—whereas after the revolution he was now in favor of popular education in a nationalist spirit. This was a reflection of the credo of realism, although Schumann put it into practice in only some of his post-1848 compositions—in particular the choral ballads and large sections of the late chamber works and the pieces written for domestic consumption. The Rhenish Symphony may also be included under this heading.

  Of course, Schumann did not have to demonstrate any greater degree of national consciousness after 1848 since he had always championed a specifically German musical culture. But there is perhaps a sense in which toward the end of his career he fought more vigorously for the national inheritance than he had done at an earlier date. In support of this suggestion is his dismissive response to Richard Pohl in February 1854 after Pohl had proposed a toast to Liszt and Wagner as two “musicians of the future”: “What you regard as musicians of the future, I regard as musicians of the present, and what you claim as musicians of the past (Bach, Handel, and Beethoven) strike me as the best musicians of the future.”10

  By generally upholding older German values, Schumann may have been in tune with the spirit of the times, but by continuing to criticize prevailing political conditions, by setting ballads by Ludwig Uhland, who sat on the far left in the Frankfurt National Assembly, and by writing to the extreme left-wing poet Hermann Rollett on February 7, 1854 and asking him for the text for a new choral ballad, Schumann also served notice of his credentials as a militant republican.

  Those elements that were aimed at instructing the nation and that are found more especially in the composer’s choral ballads inevitably raise the question whether this music should be regarded as a means to an end in the same way that Liszt’s symphonic poems and Wagner’s music dramas were a means to an end. By the same token, Liszt could also claim that with Les préludes and Mazeppa he had written orchestral music that was accessible to listeners even without a knowledge of his program of “national education.” And in the case of Tristan und Isolde, Wagner could draw his listeners’ attention to a motific fabric that would be a credit to any symphony. Here we are dealing with the deliberate drawing of clear-cut boundaries at the edge of the respective composer’s works, rather than with any appreciable differences. For both parties it was a question of character: either they decided to champion the magic of musical poetry or they espoused the dramaturgy of the total artwork.

  Even if the term “poetic realism” is a suitable key with which to gain access to the works that Schumann composed in Düsseldorf, those works are nonetheless remarkable for their astonishing heterogeneity. While Schumann’s musical handprint is everywhere in evidence, there are far greater stylistic differences than we find, for example, in Mendelssohn’s works, which almost all remain committed to an intellectually based neoclassical romanticism. Brahms’s works, too, are far more stylistically consistent than the later Schumann felt was necessary, to say nothing of Wagner, for whom such questions became irrelevant as soon as he pinned his colors to the mast of the musical drama. And as for Bruckner, we are reminded of the wit who once claimed—not entirely unjustly—that the Austrian composer wrote the same symphony nine times in all.

  By contrast, the range of Schumann’s Düsseldorf works is vast: at one end of the scale are the intentionally popular choral ballads and the oratorio Der Rose Pilgerfahrt (The pilgrimage of the rose), at the other the hermetic violin sonatas and the Songs of Dawn. Between these two extremes are the songs for voice and piano, the Mass and Requiem, and the three symphonic works: the Rhenish Symphony and the cello and violin concertos. Yet not even these last three works present a uniform picture, for whereas the symphony is remarkably forward-looking, the Cello Concerto in A Minor op. 129 is neoclassical in character, with its typically Schumannesque ideas and beautiful solo writing, but also a stereotypical formal structure. The violin concerto, finally, reveals a completely different side of Schumann as an orchestral composer breaking free from generic conventions, for all that relics of those conventions continue, of course, to be present.

  During his earlier period, Schumann had composed his music and written his articles with a striking degree of careful planning: first there was the piano music, then the songs for voice and piano, after which came the orchestral works, then chamber music, and finally a great oratorio. During his years in Düsseldorf, conversely, Schumann seems to have been keen to demonstrate a more general side of his nature. In order to avoid the concert-guide approach of discussing one work after another, the present writer prefers to offer a tour d’horizon that will, however, linger at rather greater length over a few of these works—for the most part the ones that are relatively unknown.

  The three choral ballads after poems by Ludwig Uhland are rarely performed today. Schumann set them to music in a dramatized form prepared by Richard Pohl. Scored for large-scale forces of solo voices, chorus, and full orchestra, they were written with the aim of providing amateur choirs with works that, however ambitious, were not too difficult to perform. Dramaturgically compelling, they explore themes that were very much in the air at this time.

  To put it crudely, the new genre seemed to audiences to be ballads dressed in particularly luxurious musical garb. Such works have obvious parallels with the tableaux vivants presented at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art even during Mendelssohn’s time in the city, when they were regularly accompanied by music. Handel’s oratorios, too, are a distant part of the same picture—not stylistically, but in terms of their popular monumentality. Here one thinks especially of Schumann’s setting of Uhland’s Des Sängers Fluch (The minstrel’s curse) op. 139, which tells the old tale of a harper and his son. At court they sing of “spring and love, of a blissful golden age, of freedom, manly virtue, troth and righteousness,” moving the exquisitely sensitive queen to tears, while her mistrustful consort suspects betrayal and in his fury strikes down the younger minstrel with his sword. The father thereupon curses the “proud halls,” which promptly crumble to the ground.

  While dramatizing the poem, Pohl—undoubtedly with Schumann’s agreement—added considerably to the libretto’s political thrust. In his version, the two minstrels sing “the German anthem, a freedom song from ages past,” which contains the following lines:

  Wenn “Freiheit! Vaterland!” ringsum erschallet,

  Kein Sang tönt schöner in der Männer Ohren;

  Im Kampfe, wo solch heilig Banner wallet,

  Hat sich der Mann das schönste Loos erkoren.

  Dem Volke Heil, wo dieses Lied er
schallet!

  Dem Helden Preis, der diesem Volk geboren!

  Bald blüht der Frühling, bald der gold’ne Friede,

  Mit mildern Lüften und mit sanftem Liede.

  [When “Freedom! Fatherland!” rings out around,/No song in menfolk’s ear doth fairer sound;/In battle where this sacred banner flies/No man could choose a fairer fate than this./All hail the nation where this song is sung!/All hail the hero from this nation sprung!/The spring will come and bring a golden peace/With milder breezes and a song’s release.]

  Elsewhere in his libretto Pohl refers explicitly to “Master Uhland” in order to ensure that there is no doubt that the “freedom song from ages past” actually applies to the present day, a telescoping of timelines intended as a tribute to a pioneer of the bourgeois revolution who had in the meantime withdrawn into himself without, however, accepting the prevailing conditions. At a time when Schumann was writing his choral ballads, Uhland was refusing to accept either the Prussian order Pour le mérite or the Bavarian Order for Science and Art, arguing that he had no desire to emerge from the bankruptcy of German hopes weighed down with princely baubles.

  Writers on Schumann have regularly praised Des Sängers Fluch. One of the composer’s contemporaries, the Leipzig poet and writer Peter Lohmann, for example, claimed that “every character is worked out in vivid detail, right down to individual features, while the orchestra is treated in an endlessly subtle and meaningfully nuanced way and the choruses explore the whole gamut of the life of the emotions.”11 And Michael Struck, a Schumann scholar of the present day, has admired the “high level of differentiation” that the composer has brought to the “motific and thematic writing, as well as to the use of harmony and sonority.”12 At the same time, it has to be admitted that Schumann’s choral ballads have failed to survive the test of time, a situation that their praiseworthy political impulse has been unable to alter. Within the shadow of the Wagnerian music drama, the genre of the choral ballad has been unable to shake off its reputation for mere worthiness.