Robert Schumann: The Life and Work of a Romantic Composer

by Martin Geck

  The first issue of the twice-weekly Neue Zeitschrift für Musik appeared on April 3, 1834. It ran to 4 pages and had a print run of 400 copies—no mean figure when we recall that Schiller’s Horen had an average print run of 1,000 and that Cotta sold 2,500 copies of his daily Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände. In any event, Schumann’s publishers, Johann Ambrosius Barth and August Robert Friese, were pleased, although Friese later expressed his unease when Schumann’s own contributions began to appear less frequently and the circulation figures dropped in consequence. By 1843, the paper had only 340 subscribers, but the income Schumann derived from his publishing activities was still enough to provide him with a solid financial basis.

  According to the masthead of the first year’s issues, the paper was “Published by an Association of Artists and Friends of Art,” but by the second year this had changed to “Published in Association with Several Artists and Friends of Art under the Overall Responsibility of R. Schumann.” This revised wording was a more accurate reflection of the situation: until he sold the paper in 1846, Schumann edited it, and it was effectively a one-man business. And he ran it well. Although unworldly in many respects, he was down-to-earth in other ways, and from 1834 he kept a detailed list of all the letters he sent or received, all of them carefully numbered, with a brief summary of their contents in a separate column. He continued to keep this list up to date until 1854, and even though it soon included Schumann’s other correspondence, it was based initially on a desire to ensure that the paper was from the outset run along orderly lines.

  According to this list, Schumann sent out some 2,500 letters, the originals of which are now scattered all over the world and in many cases lost altogether. But what remains is still a respectable body of evidence. Schumann’s handwriting was never easy to decipher, and even his contemporary, Eduard Hanslick, noted by way of a joke: “Everyone to whom I showed the page in question looked at the final words of the first letter he sent me in Prague and insisted that they read ‘In this fetid hole,’ whereas what they actually said was ‘In this fervent hope.’”7

  By contrast, the 5,500 or so letters that Schumann received have survived almost in their entirety and are gathered together in several thick volumes in the Biblioteka Jagiellońska in Kraków. Although they are invaluable for the light that they throw on contemporary events, they have yet to be properly examined and to yield all their riches. It is interesting, perhaps, that Schumann singled out a selection of these letters, including the ones he received from Mendelssohn, and kept them in a “family chest” specially reserved for such “relics.” This particular group of letters is now in the University of Dresden Library.

  In Schumann’s day, letters were delivered with often astonishing speed, making it easier for him as editor of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik to maintain a network of contacts between publishers, supporters, writers, local correspondents, and subscribers. And in terms of contemporary discourse on musical aesthetics, we are fortunate that when it came to collecting information, he did not sit back and wait for news to break—nor did he run the risk that many a newspaper editor in the twenty-first century has to face and drown in a floodtide of news items. Rather, he went about his business with very real pleasure and affection, eager, as he was, to know what was going on in the world of music and to provide a focus of interest in the pages of his newspaper. It was not long before his readers were being invited to submit reports from their own hometowns and cities, for which they would be paid a fee of fifteen thalers per printed page. Such reports, Schumann insisted, should not be “arid notices typical of foreign correspondents but living pictures of the musical conditions that obtain in all of these places.”8

  Inevitably there were problems, but in general Schumann succeeded in filling his columns with reports from cities as far afield as Paris and St. Petersburg. And yet he was also keen to keep his readers informed about new publications in the world of music. And to the extent that this introduced a political element to his activities, it is time to examine the position of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik within the context of three rival periodicals and against the background that Schumann himself sketched out:

  The present age is characterized by its factions. Just as the world of politics can be divided up, so the world of music can be broken down into liberals, middlemen, and legitimists or into romantics, modernists, and classicists. On the right sit the members of the old school, the contrapuntalists, antiquarians, folklorists, and anti-chromatists, and on the left hand are the youths, the Phrygian caps, the despisers of form, and the brazen geniuses, among whom the Beethovenians are a class apart. In the juste milieu, young and old commingle and vacillate. Here the majority of the products of the day are to be found, here are the creatures of the moment, fathered by it and destroyed by it.9

  According to this taxonomy, Caecilia belonged in the reactionary, “classical” camp of the old “contrapuntalists.” It was a conservative periodical that was chiefly interested in the theory of music, arguing that, historically speaking, music had culminated in the figure of Mozart. According to Caecilia, the music of late-period Beethoven was an aberration. Iris im Gebiete der Tonkunst (Iris in the field of music) was Rellstab’s publication. Although less rigorous in its approach, it adopted a highly skeptical view of all avant-garde developments. In 1833, for example, Rellstab felt called upon to make a symbolic gesture and dismiss Chopin’s Mazurkas op. 7 on account of their “earsplitting dissonances, tortured transitions, piercing modulations, and repugnant distortions of the melodic line and rhythm.”10 Shortly afterward, Rellstab adopted an equally hostile tone in his review of Schumann’s Intermezzos op. 4 and Kinderscenen op. 15, while the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, in its “Letters from Paris,” responded by taking exception to Rellstab’s harsh critique of Chopin’s Mazurkas.11

  The “middlemen” of the juste milieu were represented by the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, which had been published in Leipzig since 1798 and, as such, was the maiden aunt among music journals and the main rival to Schumann’s new enterprise. In fact, Schumann himself contributed on occasion to the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, but he hated it on account of its lack of passion and indifference and preferred to number himself—not without a dash of irony—among the romantics to the left of center, the “despisers of form,” and “brazen geniuses.” And perhaps it was specifically with himself in mind that he devised the subcategory of the “Beethovenians.”

  This subcategory also included Adolph Bernhard Marx, who edited the liberal Berliner Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung from 1824 until it folded in 1830. Schumann could with some justification regard his own Neue Zeitschrift as Marx’s belated successor, even though the focus of his interest lay elsewhere. Far more than Marx, Schumann was keen to promote an exchange of ideas and engage with the contemporary musical scene in what he hoped would be a productive way. As for the extensive reviews section of his paper, he pursued his own agenda, one that was both pragmatic and based on sound principles. His fixation on piano music was pragmatic but also a little self-interested, for in his eyes it remained the clearest possible mirror of the musical zeitgeist. And in terms of his subscribers’ practical interests, there is no doubt that piano music played a predominant role, second only to songs, which were initially treated rather shabbily by the Neue Zeitschrift. But works scored for larger forces were also discussed in its pages—even the first year’s issues contained reviews of such recent works as Auber’s opera Gustave III, ou Le bal masqué (Gustavus III, or the masked ball) and Carl Loewe’s oratorio Die eherne Schlange (The iron snake), although neither piece was written by Schumann, whose famous reviews of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique and Schubert’s Symphony in C Major (Great) appeared a little later.

  Three columns were intended to reflect the topicality of Schumann’s periodical: “Reviews,” “From Our Own Correspondents,” and “Chronicle.” There were also “Essays on Theory” and “Belles Lettres,” which allowed the editor to live hand-to-mouth and put off d
ealing with submissions he disliked. Even so, he was obliged to compromise in this regard: the short stories by Johann Peter Lyser about Handel, Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart may not have been to his liking, for they were markedly inferior to a multilayered romantic masterpiece like E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “Chevalier Gluck” and lacked characters as complex as Kapellmeister Kreisler, who threatens to stab himself with an augmented fifth while wearing a coat in C-sharp minor with a collar in D major.

  But Lyser—better known as a draftsman and portrait painter who included Beethoven among his sitters—was a member of the League of David, and Schumann was generally tolerant of their works whenever it was a question of reviewing them. He may also have been fascinated by Lyser’s dissolute life as an artist: the latter had tried his hand at the most varied professions and on one occasion had had to be rescued from a debtor’s prison by Mendelssohn. He was also friendly with Heine. Prematurely deaf, he ended his days in a poorhouse in Altona. In a review devoted to new dance compositions, Schumann wrote a tribute to Lyser under his League of David name, Fritz Friedrich: “On the other hand a whole carnival dances in the German Dances [by Schubert]. ‘And it would be great,’ Florestan shouted in Fritz Friedrich’s ear, ‘if you got out your magic lantern and used shadows to recreate the masked ball on the wall.’ He rushed away, jubilant, and was soon back.”12

  The writer and folksong collector Anton Wilhelm Florentin von Zuccalmaglio led a similarly peripatetic, albeit less restless, existence. His 130 or so articles appeared in the Neue Zeitschrift between 1835 and 1850, some of them signed “Village Sexton Wedel.” Although “Gottschalk Wedel” was capable of satire, he was generally content to enthuse in such a naïvely generous way about the manifold miracles of music that Schumann was able to announce on December 17, 1835: “Wedel has been appointed to the League of David.”13 Present-day readers will be familiar with Zuccalmaglio’s name, if at all, as the author of the quietistic poem “Kein schöner Land in dieser Zeit” (No fairer land in the present age), but a more belligerent side emerges from the poem “Die Liedertafeln” (The glee clubs), the last verse of which reads:

  Was jetzt in Liedersprudeln gährt,

  Der Freiheit Preis und Wonne,

  Und was den Tag uns festlich klärt,

  Der Strahl der neuen Sonne,

  Es kann in Männerthaten glühn,

  Wie nur die Feinde drohen.

  Das Lied wird dann vom Schwerte sprühn,

  Gesang zu Schlachten lohen.14

  [The fountainhead of song now seethes/With freedom’s joy and full-toned praise,/The day, transfigured, now bequeaths/A new sun’s incandescent rays:/Men’s deeds can glow with lambent fire,/Our foes can threaten as they may./Our songs will flash with swordplay’s ire,/Our battle songs shall light the day.]

  Schumann showed a good deal of courage when he quoted this poem on the title page of the issue of January 27, 1837, for at a time when every publication had to meet with the censor’s approval, such consciously vague threats were as likely as not to cause political offense. And although Schumann could not have foreseen at this stage the revolutions of 1848 and 1849, such threats would have been welcome to him precisely because of their ambiguity: in no circumstances was his newspaper to be a magazine for philistines; and playing with fire is always fun.

  Schumann’s use of the word “philistines” derives from the language of students, but his concern for the most part was the clash between artists and the willfully inartistic, a meaning already explored by Goethe in one of his “Parables”:

  Gedichte sind gemalte Fensterscheiben!

  Sieht man vom Markt in die Kirche hinein

  Da ist alles dunkel und düster;

  Und so sieht’s auch der Herr Philister:

  Der mag denn wohl verdrießlich sein

  Und lebenslang verdrießlich bleiben.15

  [Songs are like painted windowpanes!/In darkness wrapp’d the church remains,/If from the market-place we view it;/Thus sees the ignoramus through it./No wonder that he deems it tame,—/And all his life ’twill be the same.]

  Schumann was determined that artists rather than pedants should write for his Neue Zeitschrift, and he applied this precept not only to the articles that were “literary” in the narrower sense of the term but also to the reviews section. His aim of having new works reviewed above all by composers is one that he achieved mainly by writing the reviews himself, although he was also willing to give space to divergent opinions. When he reviewed Spohr’s symphony Die Weihe der Töne (The consecration of tones), for example, he appended a second review by the respected Viennese composer and music theorist Ignaz von Seyfried; and when he discussed Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, he prefaced his review with a piece that had appeared in the Revue musicale condemning the work in no uncertain terms—it was this piece that had alerted him to the existence of Berlioz’s composition. And so we find him writing on June 19, 1835:

  We have had the piano score in our hands for some weeks now. It was with horror that we saw and played it. Gradually, however, our opinion took shape and was so clearly at odds with that of Monsieur Fétis that we decided to offer our readers a brief and free translation of his review. Our own assessment will follow as soon as possible. Until then we would encourage those who are interested in the exceptional to familiarize themselves with this symphony.16

  The Neue Zeitschrift then published a piece signed by “Florestan” that was largely poetic in character, but Schumann followed this up with a longer article, which he signed himself and which offered a more detailed account of the compositional aspects of the work. It was thanks to Schumann that within a year a work by Berlioz had received its first performance in Germany and, moreover, in Leipzig. True, it was not Mendelssohn who introduced the work to his Gewandhaus audience but—probably—the city’s Euterpe Society that gave the successful local premiere of the overture to Berlioz’s unfinished opera Les francs-juges.

  Berlioz published a letter of thanks to Schumann in the Revue et Gazette musicale, and the Neue Zeitschrift covered the ensuing controversy raised by the merits and demerits of a work that struck many contemporaries as newfangled in the extreme. The yea-sayers were represented by the Weimar composer and music theorist Johann Christian Lobe, their opponents by the honorary member of the League of David, Florentin von Zuccalmaglio. With hindsight we can only congratulate Schumann for opening the columns of his newspaper to the debate about Berlioz and for instigating the lively discussion that was conducted thereafter in much of Germany and Austria.

  It would be little short of a miracle, of course, if everything had gone according to plan in the case of a newly established newspaper that appeared with such striking frequency. But although Schumann knew that he would often have to compromise, he stuck to his principle of maintaining the paper’s distinctive style, no matter how varied and random the individual details may have been. Their subject matter may have been different, but all the contributions were to be imbued with the same spirit of poetry that was to help pave the way for the “new poetic age” of which he dreamed.

  In order to signal that every issue was held together, as it were, by an invisible poetic bond, Schumann adopted the model of Cotta’s Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände and prefaced it with a motto of its own. The very first issue, for example, began with a Shakespearean quotation rich in allusive symbolism:

  Only they

  That come to hear a merry bawdy play,

  A noise of targets, or to see a fellow

  In a long motley coat guarded with yellow,

  Will be deceived.17

  Schumann took over many quotations from the Morgenblatt, in some cases even within a day or so of their initial appearance there. On June 19, 1834, for example, he reproduced a couplet from Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage that the Morgenblatt had used only two days earlier:

  And yet how lovely in thine age of woe,

  Land of lost Gods and godlike men, art thou!18

  As the motto for the next issue, Schuma
nn chose a distich from one of Goethe’s Roman Elegies:

  Thou art indeed a world, oh Rome; and yet, were Love absent,

  Then would the world be no world, then would e’en Rome be no Rome.19

  In each case the choice was apt, for the main article was devoted, respectively, to the world of Italian music and to the specific situation in Rome.

  Schumann had already written his Papillons op. 2 when for the July 28, 1835 issue of Neue Zeitschrift he chose lines from the Elements of Natural History by the German naturalist and philosopher Lorenz Oken:

  The butterfly is in every respect the highest insect. Its consummate life consists of a mere fluttering. A butterfly lives simply in the air and in the light. Its body is made up almost entirely of wings, its ability to set foot on the ground has, as it were, been forgotten. The most beautiful colors have settled upon it; its life is one of pleasure and love.20

  Perhaps the composer saw a parallel here with his own life as an artist.

  Schumann was clearly eager to use these mottos as a way of helping his readers to understand that the world of music was immeasurably enriched if belles lettres played its part—regardless of whether it was Shakespeare, Byron, Herder, Goethe, Schiller, Jean Paul, Lenau, or Herwegh. At the same time these mottos allowed him to throw open a window on those distant landscapes of the mind in which he wanted his periodical to be located.

  But Schumann managed to achieve even more than this, weaving what can only be termed a spiritual bond around his paper’s daily news items: it is a bond that bears the name of the League of David. When setting up the paper, he had in fact refrained from announcing that the “artists and friends of art” who supported him were members of the League, preferring instead to play a clever game of hide-and-seek and telling Zuccalmaglio that “for many people the mysterious nature of the whole affair has something appealing about it and, like all that is concealed from view, it exerts a particular power.”21