Robert Schumann: The Life and Work of a Romantic Composer

by Martin Geck

  At the same time, this letter is impressive evidence of the sort of romantic approach to epistolary effusions that flourished in the wake of Jean Paul: individuals and events from real life would merge with artistic figures and other fantasies. Schumann was in fact reacting to a letter from Clara that she had signed: “Your friend Clara Wieck. Clara Wieck. Doppelgänger.” “Your letter,” he wrote, “was you. You stood before me, talking, laughing, and, as always, leaping from matters of great seriousness to others that were mere fun, playing with veils as diplomats do—in short, the letter was Clara—the doppelgänger.”40

  To be precise, the first part of the above quotation actually appears in the holograph as “Your letter you.” The space between the second and third words is filled with a further word that Schumann has written in pencil with a deliberate lack of clarity. The letter contains a further twenty such words that Schumann then explained in a postscript:

  In great haste and in spite of my being very busy, I am preparing a kind of lexicon of the unclearly written words that I’ve placed in brackets. As a result the letter may be very colorful and piquant. The idea is by no means inglorious. Addio, clarissima Cara, cara Clarissima!

  really—sufficed—chords of a ninth—tender—a—year—Rosenthal—chocolate—was simpler—galley—grieved—was—Eusebius—neatly—makes—bright—July evenings—window—right—preacher—Robert Schumann—41

  This tendency to confuse different categories and to invest them with a sense of mystery was dear to the hearts of the romantics—the reader may be reminded here of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s novel The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr Together With a Fragmentary Biography of Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler on Random Sheets of Waste Paper, which is based on the notion that while writing out his views on life, the tomcat occasionally used for his draft pages from a biography of Kreisler, which the compositor erroneously set as part of the text. The romantics’ demand that poetry should be a part of our lives and that life should be poured into poetry was applied by Hoffmann to an elaborate work of literature, whereas Schumann privileges the elements of fun and jest. But the claim to be taken seriously as art also shines through here inasmuch as lines of music are included within the text of these letters, such music serving not just as a banal illustration but as a symbol of something that must otherwise remain unsaid.

  In the summer of 1834 Schumann became engaged to Ernestine von Fricken, which suggests that at this date his feelings for Clara amounted to no more than a friendship between two artists in the spirit of romantic art. Of course, Schumann acknowledged Clara as a physical human being, but in his eyes she was also Zilia or Chiara, to give her the names by which she was known to the League of David. And it is the League of David that will engage our more detailed interest in Intermezzo II.

  Intermezzo II

  Figments of the Imagination

  The satirical tale about the clockmaker BOGS who after his death applies to be “received into bourgeois society” was written jointly by two German romantics, Joseph Görres and Clemens Brentano. First published in 1807, it was intended as a critique of the philistinism of the ordinary burgher whose life ran like clockwork. In particular it questioned the belief that skull measurements might say something about a person’s normality or abnormality.

  From the outset, BOGS, who is depicted opposite in a line drawing from the 1807 edition of the satire, senses that his attempts to gain acceptance will meet with resistance: after all, he is not “normal” because he is soon thrown off balance by music. And in fact, he receives a provisional notification informing him that his “mad ideas about music” are incompatible with “land, state, and rifle club,” which is why he is required to behave “normally” while attending a concert: “If you attend this concert and can prove that you were not unduly affected by it, your application for membership may proceed.”1

  BOGS does as he is told but has to admit that on listening to a Haydn symphony he has again been beside himself with emotion:

  A thousand flames poured from the violins, and a thousand salamanders bathed in them, and from the violas and violoncellos a thousand philistines emerged, but Samson sprang from the timpani and struck them dead with his jawbone, and as they sank, the evening sky turned red, before the light faded and moonlight poured from the trumpets.

  Such rhapsodizing was hardly to the liking of the “land, state, and rifle club,” which duly invited a team of doctors to examine “the clockmaker’s state of health.” Three physicians, Schnauznas, Gamaliel, and Sphex, began a detailed examination and took various measurements. In the process they observed that BOGS had two different faces, one with dark eyes and a bulging brow, the other with hazel eyes and a receding forehead. Worse, they even noticed that his two skulls were differently shaped:

  A bump on one was invariably canceled out by an indentation on the other: high spirits, low spirits, arrogance, humility, stolidity, fickleness, murderous intent, dove-like docility, thievishness, and the desire to catch thieves all negated each other in turn, so that no one could work out the subject’s actual nature and qualities.2

  The clockmaker BOGS as depicted in the first edition of The Strange Story of the Clockmaker BOGS (1807), by Johann Joseph von Görres and Clemens Brentano. (Photograph by the author.)

  The doctors became curious and used an endoscope to get inside BOGS’s brain, the walls of which were found to be hung with thousands of microscopic clocks that were no longer striking in time with each other as a result of the concert that BOGS had been instructed to attend: BOGS was no longer “ticking” properly. And when his body was suspended from a thread and left to swing freely, the head no longer pointed to the North Pole and the feet to the South Pole, as they should have done. Instead, the positions were reversed. The symphony had disoriented him.

  Readers will recall the phrenological studies on Schumann’s head that were mentioned earlier. According to Noel’s diagnosis, there was “nothing really abnormal” about the composer. Was Schumann really relieved to hear this, as I assumed was the case? At least as an artist, he was striving to escape from the bonds of normality, for he was far closer to the romantics Görres and Brentano than to the “normalist” Noel. He was also closer to his idol E. T. A. Hoffmann, who in his fairytale Master Flea allows a certain Peregrinus to look inside the brain of the sleeping Dörtje Elverdink with the help of a tiny microscope. Winding their way through the network of veins and arteries were

  brightly flashing silver threads, probably a hundred times finer than those of the finest spider’s web, and these threads, which appeared to be endless since they coiled out of the brain and lost their way in a certain something that could not be made out even with a microscopic eye, were confusing in the extreme.3

  This talk of confusing imagination and imaginative confusion inevitably recalls two of Schumann’s other idols, Jean Paul and Heinrich Heine. Jean Paul’s Titan contains the sentences: “Suddenly individual notes on a flute flew up from the leaves up there on the mountains—more and more flew out and joined them, fluttering around in a state of beautiful confusion.”4 And in Das Buch le Grand, Heine notes enthusiastically that “the world is so delightfully confused.”5

  Schumann himself has provided us with an example of this “delightful confusion” in the form of the letter puzzle that he sent to Clara. But whereas that particular document was intended as no more than a joke, the subject will acquire a much greater seriousness in the course of the following chapters, which deal with the way in which he transfers this idea to his art. What concerns us here is not simply a few entertaining letters but the whole concept of an important music periodical; and not just individual compositions such as “Traumes Wirren” (Dream’s Confusions) but a basic theme of his whole creative output.

  The worst thing that could happen to an artist like Schumann would be to subject him to the sort of examination that the clockmaker BOGS had to endure and to seek to draw a distinction between “normal” and “abnormal” characteristics—and thi
s is true even if we take a charitable view of the “abnormal” features and see them as somehow attractive. The shock that BOGS felt on hearing the Haydn symphony is already built into Schumann’s works from the outset—and not only into his own. “Cantor, beware of the storms! The lightning will not send out any liveried servants to warn you before it strikes. At best there will be a storm followed by a bolt of thunder!”6 This comment on the part of Schumann/Florestan will be examined in greater detail in the course of the following pages. It refers to the shock of the opening bars of the final movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and to a cantor who thinks he can explain such things in theoretical terms and tick them off as having been dealt with.

  There is only one thing that would be worse, and that would be to attempt to reduce Schumann’s individuality as a composer to questions of biography and character, for we could then start looking for personal defects in the case of Görres and Brentano, E. T. A. Hoffmann and Jean Paul, Heine and Eichendorff. If post-Renaissance art has a task to perform, then it is to call into question our understanding of normality. And in Schumann’s case it is admirably successful in meeting this aim.

  “By the way, don’t be alarmed! I’m growing a mustache,” Schumann added in a postscript to his letter to his mother of April 9, 1834 (Jugendbriefe von Robert Schumann 238). The present silhouette presumably dates from the same period. A note in Clara Schumann’s hand attests to its authenticity. One wonders if she received it as a gift at this time. When Wagner had a silhouette of himself prepared the following year, he gave it to his fiancée, Minna Planer. (Photograph courtesy of the Robert Schumann Museum, Zwickau.)

  CHAPTER 3

  The Neue Zeitschrift für Musik

  In the short time that we have been operating we have learnt a good deal. Our thinking was clear from the outset. It is straightforward, and it is this: to acknowledge the past and its products, and to draw attention to our belief that in art the new and the beautiful can derive their strength only from a source as pure as this—and then to combat the recent past as inartistic, the only substitute for that past being an increase in the merely mechanical. Finally we shall then help to prepare and usher in a new poetic age.

  Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, January 2, 18351

  It was while reading his favorite novel, Jean Paul’s Flegeljahre, that Schumann was introduced to Vult and Walt, whom he soon came to regard as close friends. The former was a wily flute player, the latter a dreamy poet. Together the twins built castles in the air. And it was Vult and Walt who were the immediate inspiration behind Schumann’s own set of twins, whom he mentions for the first time in July 1831: “Some entirely new people have entered my diary today—two of my best friends, even though I’ve never set eyes on them before. They are called Florestan and Eusebius.”2 Schumann regarded them as poetic reflections of his own “dual nature,” which he was “keen to fuse together as a single person.”3 At the risk of over-simplification, we could describe Florestan as the extrovert, sanguine idealist, Eusebius as the more introverted, or at least a more thoughtful dreamer. They were quickly joined by Master Raro and Zilia, the worldly-wise Raro being a cover identity for the idealized figure of Friedrich Wieck, while Clara Wieck lay behind Zilia, Chiara, and Chiarina, a composite figure notable for her understanding and appreciation of art.

  Florestan, Eusebius, Master Raro, and Zilia were all founding members of the League of David that Schumann summoned into existence at this time. Just as real life and fiction, sentiment and a sober attitude to life were inextricably linked in Jean Paul’s Flegeljahre and just as the political and social present was concealed behind the poetic world of his Unsichtbare Loge (Invisible opera box), so Schumann’s League of David led a volatile existence, switching between fiction and reality and between the quotidian and mystification. This is the poeticization and romanticization of a life that has to be lived in the real world but which is bearable only as an alternative construct in the individual’s imagination—only with our own fantasy can we play with this life, rather than allowing it to play with us.

  Anyone wanting to help in preparing for a “new poetic age” cannot do so, of course, as a loner or as an eccentric familiar with nothing beyond the confines of his or her own diary. Rather, they and their “community” need to engage with the world. And so we find Schumann at the end of 1833 publishing a kind of unfinished novel with the heading: “The Member of the League of David. Communicated by S*. Leipzig’s world of music. First article.” It appeared in Der Komet, a Leipzig-based periodical highly regarded by the Young German movement of the time. The following excerpt allows us the best possible insight into Schumann as a young writer:

  Above me, a window was quickly thrown open, and behind it I recognized in the half-shadow an angular, wry-nosed roundhead. Just as I was looking up, something like finely scented leaves fluttered down and played around my temples: they were scraps of paper that had been thrown down from the window. Back at home I felt as if I were rooted to the spot when I read the following on a sheet wrapped up in some heavier paper:

  Our Italian nights are continuing. Florestan the idealist has gone quieter than ever in recent days and seems to have something on his mind. But Eusebius let slip a few words that roused the Old Adam in him. After reading a copy of Iris, the latter said: “But he’s gone too far.”—“What? How’s that? Eusebius,” Florestan started up at this point, “Rellstab [Ludwig Rellstab (1799–1860), an influential Berlin music critic hostile to the romantic movement and the editor of the music magazine Iris] has gone too far? Is this infernal German politeness to last for centuries? While the literary factions oppose each other and engage in open feuding, art critics simply shrug their shoulders, evincing a degree of reserve that cannot be understood or sufficiently condemned. Why not simply dismiss those who have no talent? Why not throw the insipid and moribund out of court, together with the presumptuous? Why not stick warning notices on works that end where criticism begins? Why do writers not have a newspaper of their own in which they can inveigh against critics and challenge them to be even ruder about their works? [. . .] It is time to stand up to the defensive and offensive alliance forged between meanness and defiance before it overwhelms us and there is no longer any prospect of putting an end to the whole of this wretched situation. But what do you think, Master Raro?”

  You know Raro’s affecting way of speaking, which is made even stranger by his Italian accent, how he strings sentences together, before taking them apart, fitting them together again, entwining them even more tightly, then summing up everything again at the end and seeming to say: “That’s what I meant.”

  “Florestan,” retorted the Master, “what you say is true, even though I cannot approve of the way you express it. Remove the mask when the highest gifts and abilities of the mind are concerned. [. . .] Does not secretiveness give the appearance of—”

  Here the sheet of paper was torn, but on the back were the words:

  “Inventor! You have been chosen for greatness and for the good! You are to become a member of the League of David and translate the League’s mysteries for the world—that is, the League that is to strike dead the philistines, musical and otherwise! Now you know everything—now you must act! Yet those actions must not be provincially narrow-minded but confused and insane. Master Raro, Florestan, Eusebius, Friedrich, Bg., St., Hf., Knif, Balkentreter to St. George.”4

  In keeping with its heading, “Leipzig’s Musical Scene,” the article also discussed current events in the city, not contenting itself with a mere reference to a savage attack on Chopin’s Mozart Variations in Rellstab’s Iris but allowing its readers to see a concert review that the first-person narrator effectively copies out before their very eyes. The writer, who signed himself simply as “E.” (presumably Eusebius), also mentioned the name of Clara Wieck, a local heroine in the musical life of the city, and advised her to perform keyboard concertos by Bach and Handel.5

  Inevitably the review itself was interrupted, adding to the sense
of tension: “I had reached this point in copying out the piece when a handsome, black-haired youth entered the room and silently handed me a letter.—“Who are you?” But he was already on his way out. What was in the letter? “I want to say it in your ear—————————Did you hear?”6

  The motif of the scraps of paper found by the narrator clearly recalls the word games in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Tomcat Murr and Jean Paul’s Leben Fibels (Life of Fibel). And the same is true of Schumann’s trick of having the narrator interrupt his task of copying out the review and whispering the contents of a letter in his reader’s imaginary ear. And we do not have to waste time wondering whether the aforementioned writers made things easier for themselves with their romantic humor than their imitators, for with Schumann we find something new and, indeed, unique inasmuch as he integrates into his poetic text elements of professional music criticism which, far from being abstract, are related to concerts currently taking place in Leipzig.

  It is hard to imagine a more exciting trial run for a new periodical, as Schumann turned his plans into a game drawing on elements from both real life and the world of poetry. But it was a game also designed to inspire him with the courage to tackle such a major project. At the same time, we may observe a twenty-three-year-old who, in spite of all the emotional crises he had been through, was able to reconcile ideality and reality in an astonishingly professional manner. Notwithstanding his lofty aim of giving a voice to musical romanticism, he never for a moment lost touch with reality: the new journal needed a publisher, subscribers, distributors, advertisers, and reliable contributors.