Robert Schumann: The Life and Work of a Romantic Composer
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Flechsig seems to have been Schumann’s roommate, lending his wellheeled friend a helping hand and perhaps earning the right to free accommodation in return. According to the composer Johann Friedrich Täglichsbeck, who during this period played quartets with Schumann:
Schumann was living on the Brühl with his roommate Flechsig, a lively enough lad, though he rarely put in an appearance at our musical soirées. It was an exceptionally elegant student apartment consisting of two pleasant rooms situated next to each other and looking out over the front of the building. One of the rooms could even be described as large and was admirably suited to music-making. The whole arrangement revealed a certain affluence, as did a very good grand piano that belonged to Schumann and that graced the larger of the two rooms.10
As Täglichsbeck also recalled, Schumann was fond of sitting at this instrument and playing waltzes and duets by Schubert, a composer he particularly admired. Together with the cellist Christian Gottlob Glock, a perpetual student who later became the mayor of Ostheim, they also performed Schubert’s Piano Trio in B-flat Major op. 99:
Once we had reached the point where our ensemble playing seemed to us to be adequate, Schumann organized a musical soirée to which we invited not only several music students but also, as our principal guest, the piano teacher Friedrich Wieck. The unforgettable evening ended with a brilliant supper at which the champagne flowed rather too freely, prostrating each and everyone who was present—except, perhaps, our host.11
Schumann clearly knew how to live. But he also had regular lessons with Wieck, who was a well-known teacher. He practiced assiduously and composed not only a number of songs that were well received by the Braunschweig director of music, Gottlob Wiedebein, but also a piano quartet. When filling out his passport, he toyed with the idea of listing his profession as a “music scholar.” And in his “Hottentottiana” he kept a detailed account of excerpts from his reading matter as well as aphorisms, reflections, and observations about himself. On the horizon lay the idea of a novel to be called Selene. In short, he had still not decided to become a professional musician. Time and again music became literature, and literature music: “When I listen to Beethoven’s music,” he wrote, “it is as if someone were reading Jean Paul to me: Schubert is more like Novalis, Spohr is the Ernst Schulze or the Carlo Dolci of music.”12 (Schulze was an epic poet who died prematurely in 1817, Dolci a Florentine painter of the seventeenth century. Both were morbidly religious.)
Of course, the young Schumann was fascinated not only by the connection between literature and music but also by the link between champagne and music: in one of his earliest writings, which appeared in the Leipzig Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung in December 1831, he has his League of David troupe of music enthusiasts saying of Chopin’s Variations on “Là ci darem la mano” from Mozart’s Don Giovanni that “The whole thing is in champagne,” rather than the expected “The whole thing is in B-flat major.”13 It is a metaphor well suited to the situation, making it all the more regrettable that Schumann omitted this witticism from his collected writings. What he find there instead is another comment about Chopin that is symptomatic of his sympathy for the Polish liberation movement of the 1830s: if the Russian tsar “knew to what extent a dangerous foe threatened him in Chopin’s works, in the simple tunes of his mazurkas, he would ban this music. Chopin’s works are cannons buried among flowers.”14
There was no shortage of “student excesses,” as Schumann called them.15 For a while he took up fencing, and as for his experiments with narcotics, we find him noting in his diary:
Strong cigars make me feel high & poetic; the more my body is relaxed, the more my mind is excitable. Whenever I am drunk or have been physically sick, my imagination floats higher & more freely the next day. While drunk I can do nothing, only afterwards. Black coffee also makes me drunk, if not black-humored.16
However exciting this may sound, Leipzig had already lost its charm for Schumann after only two terms. He felt drawn instead to Heidelberg, where he was less visible to his worried mother and his circle of family and friends in Zwickau. But Heidelberg was also the home of Justus Thibaut, who taught Roman law at the local university, providing Schumann with an excellent excuse to move to the town. In fact, it was Thibaut the amateur music lover who drew the young Schumann there. Not only had Thibaut written a slender volume, Über Reinheit der Tonkunst (Purity in music), but he also conducted a choir dedicated to the performance of early music.
Before Schumann moved to Heidelberg for the winter term of 1829–30 and could enthuse about the “wonderful, godlike” Thibaut,17 he traveled extensively, taking boat rides up and down the Rhine and not hesitating to send his mother a typical “Rhineland menu,” even though she could not have been entirely happy with her son’s conspicuous consumerism:
Delicious soup
Beef or cutlets with three kinds of vegetable
Asparagus with ox tongue
Meat pies
Fricassee of veal or steamed liver
Eel or salmon
Fresh salmon
Stuffed pigeon pie
Three kinds of roast and the finest dessert18
This may also be a suitable place to reproduce the postscript to a letter that Schumann wrote to his future landlady in Leipzig, Johanne Christiane Devrient, on September 15, 1837, explaining what she could serve him when he came to board with her:
Menu of a Thrifty Individual
Nothing fatty or sweet. Favorite foods:
Beef with rice, dumplings, pearl barley & the like.
Veal, mutton, pork, more rarely, if it’s not too fatty. All kinds of roast meat as long as they’re not fatty—
Desserts, none, none at all.
Egg dishes, fine.
Soup, consommé, yes please.
Fruit, bottled fruit, no.
Salads, pickled, all.
Fish, all except for eel.
Vegetables, yes please, except for sweet ones such as carrots etc.19
Between late August and late October 1829 Schumann visited Switzerland and Italy—it was almost a grand tour of the kind undertaken by Mendelssohn at almost the same time—they missed each other in Venice by only a year.
Back in Heidelberg, Schumann began to practice the piano in earnest, and on January 24, 1830, he played Moscheles’s Alexander Variations in the concert hall attached to the town’s museum:
Stumbled at the beginning—final variation perfectly played—endless applause, congratulations etc.———to Borngasser’s—Smollis and Krug from Leipzig—with Arnold & Beelitz from Berlin, with Jung from Rheinbayern, with Labes from Danzig [modern Gdańsk]—the drunken Counts Schulenburg & Hohenthal—people delighted—kind Director Hofmann—Lemke—praised to the skies—Faulhaber—H[err] Lind—Jung delighted—staggered home delighted—at 2 o’clock.20
Schumann’s diary entry for Sunday, January 24 sounds like the beginning of a promising career as a virtuoso. But within two days we find three words hidden away among a number of other entries: “My numb finger.”21 From that point on, there were numerous such signals, most of them coinciding with Schumann’s decision to become a professional musician. He was presumably unfamiliar with the word “stress,” but it may well apply to a situation that he undoubtedly felt to be rife with conflict: for him, it was the tone-poet or, more prosaically, the composer who embodied the profession of musician, but as an unknown young man it was impossible for him to earn his living as a composer, which left only a career as a pianist.
But is this what Schumann really dreamed of becoming? After all, it was only a few years later that he set up the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik with the avowed aim of combating what he felt were the lapses in taste on the part of composers such as Henri Herz and Franz Hünten,22 two popular salon pianists who, thanks to Schumann’s invective, became synonymous with mindless virtuosity. Chopin and Liszt would have been preferable as models and they were certainly admired by Schumann from a very early age, but as his contemporaries, they too were a
t the start of their careers. As a result, Schumann had to find his own way and, understandably for a youth who had not yet turned twenty, this journey was to prove a bumpy one.
On the one hand, Schumann practiced, made music, read, and wrote poetry, while on the other he attended one party after another, all of them involving dancing, alcohol, and flirtatious liaisons. His diary entry for February 8, 1830, reads simply:
This is the most dissolute week of my life,
This is the most dissolute week of my life,
This is the most dissolute week of my life
-----my life.23
In April 1830 he and Theodor Töpken traveled to Frankfurt to hear Paganini. He was deeply impressed by the violinist’s playing, which was virtuosic, but not in a superficial way. Rather, there was an element of shamanism or sorcery to it that consorted well with the “black” romanticism that Schumann liked. Finally, on July 30, 1830, Schumann had reached the point where he felt able to write to his mother and inform her of his decision to become a musician. She responded by asking Friedrich Wieck about her son’s abilities. Wieck advised her to summon Schumann back “to our cold dull Leipzig” from Heidelberg, the “warmth” of which was “causing his imagination to become even more overheated.” On this condition he offered to turn Schumann into “one of the greatest living pianists,” which “in view of his talent and imagination” he claimed to be able to do
within three years. He will play with greater intelligence and warmth than Moscheles and more magnificently than Hummel. As proof I offer you my own eleven-year-old daughter, whom I am just beginning to present to the world. As for composition, our Cantor Weinlich [the cantor of St. Thomas’s Church, Theodor Weinlig] would certainly be adequate for now.24
Schumann’s mother was not convinced, however, and suspected—not without good reason—that the well-known piano teacher was thinking above all of his own reputation. Moreover, Schumann himself was by no means certain of what he wanted to do. He continued to practice like a man possessed, but on September 25, 1830, he was obliged to admit to a friendly physician, Ernst August Carus (the husband of Agnes Carus, whom we have already met) that in the course of the previous winter there were times when he was no longer able to think about “finger exercises and scales.” Rather, he had “reached the point when, whenever I had to double under my fourth finger, my whole body would twist convulsively and after six minutes of finger exercises I felt the most interminable pain in my arm—in a word, it felt as if it were broken.”25
Although he turned up for his first lesson with Wieck in October 1830, Schumann was not really enamored of either his teacher or of Leipzig, but preferred the idea of studying in Weimar with Hummel, who had been a pupil of Mozart. He was also thinking of writing an opera, Hamlet, on which the worthy Weinlig would almost certainly have been unable to help him. And yet he remained in Leipzig—not least because he was in serious financial difficulty. Indeed, he was less and less able to survive on the bills of exchange that his mother sent him on a regular basis. As a result, he sank further and further into debt. At least for the present, then, travel was out of the question.
On January 21, 1831, Schumann wrote to his mother, begging her to send him one hundred thalers:
God knows, I’m not lying when I say that during the last two weeks I don’t think I’ve eaten a roast or meat more than twice, but simply potatoes. [. . .] Poverty may well be the worst thing that could happen to a person because it cuts you off completely from human society. I’m now beginning to understand this, and there’s much that I regret.26
He pawned a number of his books and a watch that his mother had given him and waited for June 8, the day on which he came of age and would receive the money his father had left him. He used it to settle his debts and was even able to buy a grand piano on which he practiced zealously under the watchful eye of Friedrich Wieck, in whose house he lived for a time. In September 1831, father and daughter then set off on a seven-month concert tour, leaving Schumann to his own devices.
Soon afterward, Schumann reported in his project book on the “paralysis” of his “right hand.”27 In spite of this, he continued his attempts to strengthen his third finger, this time using a “cigar mechanism”28 (presumably a kind of device intended to immobilize the finger). But this helped only for a time, and by August 9, 1832, he was obliged to admit that “my whole house has become an apothecary’s.”29 He was now taking “animal baths,” bathing his hand in alcohol, and applying a herbal bandage at night.
Lessons with Wieck continued, and after a course of some kind of electrical treatment had proved, if anything, counterproductive, Schumann reported to his mother on June 28, 1833: “I’m now having my hand treated homeopathically.”30 He still appears to have taken an optimistic view of the situation, but another passage in the same letter must give us pause for thought:
A group of young and well-educated people, mostly music students, has sprung up around me, a circle that I in turn am drawing closer to Wieck’s house. Most of all, we are taken by the idea of new, major musical journal.31
By now Schumann had largely abandoned the idea of a career as a virtuoso, and he seems to have done so without any great regret now that other opportunities had opened up to him in this field.
Schumann’s hand injury raises two further points. First, there is evidence that in later years, whenever he was playing piano duets with Clara or other colleagues, he would avoid using the index finger of his right hand. This contradicts the traditional view that the problem affected his ring finger and his little finger. Second, excessive or inappropriate exercises may have made his problems worse, but according to current thinking, an alternative explanation may be found in the phenomenon of focal dystonia: certain parts of the brain are hyperactive, preventing the muscles from working and in that way destroying the coordination between brain and hand.32 The neurologist Oliver Sacks has described this phenomenon with reference to the American pianist Leon Fleisher who, as a result of similar problems, was able to play only works for the left hand for a period of three decades. Fleisher was then shown ways of dealing with a disorder that may have been physiological or even hereditary in origin.
Schumann was unable, of course, to wait for such medical advances, but in 1833 he was able to see himself in the role of an up-and-coming composer—to say nothing of his literary and journalistic ambitions. After all, his earliest piano pieces had already appeared in print by this date, and on November 18, 1832, the opening movement of his unfinished Zwickau Symphony in G Minor had received its successful first performance in his hometown.
If we believe Schumann’s diaries, the period that he spent in Leipzig in 1832 and 1833 was marked—in spite of these few minor successes—by increasing self-doubts. “You are too insignificant to be sought out & too proud to go looking,” reads a typical entry from October 7, 1833. “In a society in which I cannot be the first, I would prefer to be nothing, rather than second or third.”33
The death of his sister-in-law Rosalie, to whom he had felt very close, plunged him into a state of immediate depression, and when his brother Julius died only a short time afterward, he wrote to his mother on November 18, 1833:
I expect you think that I don’t have the courage to travel to Zw[ickau] on my own because I am afraid of what might happen to me there. Breathlessness keeps alternating with momentary blackouts, albeit less frequently than in recent days. If you had any idea of what it is like to be affected by this melancholic, sunken-eyed sleep of the soul, you would forgive me for not having written.34
He had taken rooms on the fifth floor of a property at 21 Burgstraße, but within a few weeks he had moved down to the second floor as he could not overcome his fear of heights. In the same context, we find him writing in his diary, “Torments of the most terrible melancholia from October to December—I had been seized by the idée fixe that I was going mad.” But the very next entry reads: “Sobriety. Work as a writer. Idea for the League of David further elaborated.”35
The wound was bad in the morning & Glock [the eternal student mentioned earlier] made a face—the pain was keen & corrosive—it’s like half a—give me a whole lion that tears me apart but not a little one that just gnaws! [. . .] In the afternoon Chr[istel] pale—exchange of information—only guilt gives birth to Nemesis.36
“Charitas is coming today.”37 This is the last meaningful entry on the subject of Christel in Schumann’s diary. It is dated July 13, 1832. Immediately above it are the words “Clara is kind-hearted.” At this date, Clara was twelve, and on his regular visits to the Wieck household, Schumann would tell her fairy stories. By the following year there are the first vague signs that he was starting to fall in love with her. On July 13, 1833, for example, Schumann, who had fallen ill with the “ague,” wrote to his “dear kind Clara”:
I want to know if you’re alive and what you’re up to—there is nothing about this in your letter. I almost wish you didn’t still remember me as I’m becoming visibly thinner with each passing day and am shooting up like a beanpole without the leaves. The doctor has even forbidden me to pine so much—namely, for you—because it affects me so badly.38
This is the fourth of the 442 letters that Schumann and Clara Wieck exchanged before they were married in 1840. In her reply (no. 5), Clara gently chided him, “You can surely imagine the sort of life I’m leading! But how can I be all right when you no longer come and visit us?”39 By this date Clara had already appeared in public in Paris and at the Leipzig Gewandhaus and had written a number of works, including the Caprices en forme de valse op. 2. In August 1833 she dedicated her Romance variée op. 3 to Schumann. In a long letter that he addressed to her on July 10, 1834, he acknowledged her as a member of the League of David and, as such, as someone worth taking seriously in the group’s discussions on the subject of poetry.