Robert Schumann: The Life and Work of a Romantic Composer
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Not until the nineteenth issue did an article appear under the heading “The League of David.” In it, Eusebius, Florestan, and Raro took it in turns to express their views on Johann Nepomuk Hummel’s pianoforte Études op. 125. A footnote explained that “Unfortunately we are still unable to offer a full explanation of the heading ‘League of David,’ but the valued reader may expect one soon as the unknown hand that has already signed itself ‘Euseb.,’ ‘F–n,’ and ‘Florestan’ in previous issues has given us ample reason for hoping as much. Ed.”22
The “explanation” at the end of the thirty-eighth issue likewise has a cryptic ring to it as the Neue Zeitschrift was still appearing at this date without any explicit mention of Schumann:
Many rumors are circulating concerning the identity of the members of the League who have signed this article. Since we are unfortunately still obliged to withhold the reasons for drawing a veil over our identity, we are asking Herr Schumann (assuming that he is familiar to an honorable editorial office) to represent us with his name. The Members of the League of David.—I shall be pleased to do so, R. Schumann.23
The game that Schumann as editor was playing with his public was nothing if not bold: when would his readers, on whom he depended for the journal’s continuing existence, start to feel disoriented? For Schumann as an artist, conversely, this remained not just a game but also a process of positively existential significance—he would never have felt comfortable as the stolid editor of a serious paper. Rather, readers should be able to regard his newspaper as a part of that poetic total artwork that he wanted to help to create. And such a work was inconceivable without cryptic puzzles and masquerades and without the role-playing and changes of identity typical of E. T. A. Hoffmann and Jean Paul. The last-named in particular could be described as the Neue Zeitschrift’s spiritus rector, or inspiration.
Even the opening sentences of the “Shrovetide Address” that Schumann placed in the mouth of his alter ego, Florestan, in April 1835 had, of course, contained clear pointers to what readers should understand by the term “League of David”: “Assembled members of the League of David, that is, youths and men dedicated to the destruction of the philistines, musical and otherwise, the bigger the better”—thus Florestan addressed his comrades from his seat at his grand piano,24 before going on to discuss an actual musical event in the form of a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in the Gewandhaus in Leipzig under the retiring music director August Pohlenz.
It was not only Pohlenz’s complacency that annoyed Schumann/Florestan but also, and above all, the philistines in the audience. “David against the Philistines” was his motto. And in the course of his article Schumann/Florestan not only drew a comparison between himself and Jean Paul’s balloonist Giannozzo, who looks down implacably on human dealings from his lofty vantage point, he also struck a severely practical note, arguing that to perform a work like Beethoven’s Ninth for a subscription audience, no matter how charitably disposed it may have been, was tantamount to casting pearls before swine. In the face of such a timeless work, rhapsodic enthusiasm was the only possible response. But this did not preclude constructive criticism:
You gave me a beautiful moment there, director of music! You caught the tempo of the theme in the basses [the well-known melody accompanying the words “Freude, schöner Götterfunken” in the final movement] so wonderfully that I forgot much that had angered me in the first movement where, despite the modestly veiled performance marking “Un poco maestoso,” one hears the whole slowly striding majesty of a god.25
This was a dig at Pohlenz, but it avoided the sneering condescension and aesthetic hair-splitting about tempo decisions found in so much music criticism. Rather, Schumann was typically concerned to reconcile his own personal experience of the work—an experience that always drew on poetry and imagery—with the fixed form of the piece as it appeared in the published score and performance markings. A century later Hans-Georg Gadamer would declare the fusing of the horizons of work and observer to be the necessary precondition for any process of understanding: the mere “reproduction of an original production” of content and form can never be successful or even remotely adequate.26 For Schumann, this was self-evident, and the place where these different horizons met was the metaphor.
When Schumann writes that the “whole slowly striding majesty of a god” speaks to him from the opening of the Ninth Symphony, then he does not mean that this was the impression that Beethoven necessarily wanted to create, for Schumann offers other possible interpretations here:
Others listeners were more graphic. For them, the symphony represented the story of the origins of humankind—first chaos—then the divine “Let there be light!” And the sun rose upon the first human, who was delighted with such magnificence—in short the whole first chapter of the Pentateuch!27
This, then, was the symphony as a whole. But Schumann did not want to suggest indiscriminate associations. Rather, he took the term “progressive” seriously in the sense understood by Friedrich Schlegel when he wrote about “progressive universal poetry,”28 rightly interpreting it as an invitation to use the work of art as the starting point for further thought. This, then, was the task of that particular kind of romantic criticism of the arts to which Walter Benjamin devoted his attention in his doctoral dissertation, “The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism,” in 1919, a study that continues to prove enlightening even today.
But let us return to David’s struggle with the philistines, a battle that finds expression above all in the reviews section of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik: inferior pieces concerned only with empty effects and lacking in imagination were either ignored altogether or dismissed out of hand. In the second issue of the paper, the Grande Fantaisie et Variations op. 10 by the young Sigismond Thalberg—soon to be acclaimed by audiences in the same breath as Liszt—came within the critic’s line of fire:
A piece like this, the supreme and, indeed, the only aim of which is its desire to please, is not one that we can condone in spite of its individual beauties, its pianistic style, and its evident attempt to avoid the merely ordinary. If a young composer has not only natural talent, as Herr Thalberg does, but also understanding, he has no need to fear that he will sound ordinary if he simply passes on what he feels and perceives within him. But if he fails to appreciate this principle and if he is not even aware of its existence but worships the fashion of the day as his god, and if he subordinates his talent to the applause of the crowd, then everything that he may do to preserve his deeper qualities will be a waste of effort. And so it is with Herr Thalberg. His composition is nothing more than a new and more elegant version of works by Herz and Czerny with an extra dash of erudition.29
Although this review was probably not written by Schumann, it nonetheless sums up the beliefs of the members of the League of David: they had declared war on the opportunism that necessarily leads to superficiality, and they praised the powers of the imagination that the artist conjures up within himself. The Neue Zeitschrift never tired of drawing attention to composers who lived up to this ideal and who included not only members of a much earlier generation but also some of the major figures on the contemporary musical scene, such as Chopin, Liszt, Mendelssohn, and Henselt, as well as lesser-known artists. And who will hold it against the editor for mentioning his own piano works?
The fact that his Sonata in F-sharp Minor op. 11 was twice discussed in detail demonstrates the way in which the members of the League of David conceived of music criticism—not as a review in the traditional sense but as a form of poetic discourse. Much the same spirit had already informed the famous piece that August Wilhelm Schlegel had published in the Athenäum a generation earlier, when he had divided his discussion of a series of paintings among several different voices. In the case of Schumann’s Sonata, the views of the two critics were divided between separate articles, but the same spirit of poetry pervades them both. The tone was set by the Königsberg musician Eduard Sobolewski with his essa
y “Observations and Dreams after the F-sharp Minor Sonata by Florestan and Eusebius.” Instead of describing the work, he indulged in a series of historical reflections and poetic images, before ending with the words:
Just play the sonata again and again.—Of course, it does not contain things that you can hold up for display, no finery, no gewgaws, no thin piping sounds in the very highest register, no somersaults, but only music; and yet, if your heart is free from constraint, then you may calm your emotions in its sounds. It is an antidote to poison. It too grieves with time over time.30
Carl Ferdinand Becker’s assessment of the piece appeared three weeks later with the programmatical sentence: “This work is an authentic sign of the romanticism that has been woken up in the present day and that is now gaining ground all around us.” Becker—an authority on the Leipzig musical scene at this time—then spoke of a “new school,” which he defined as follows: “Those who place themselves at the head of this school, with its poetic painting through sounds, are Berlioz, Liszt, Hiller, Chopin, Florestan, and Eusebius.”31 By naming Florestan and Eusebius, but not Schumann himself, Becker was adhering to the composer’s own guidelines: after all, he had published the sonata under the names of his two “best friends.”
If Mendelssohn, who was currently carving a niche for himself as the undisputed star of Leipzig’s musical scene, was missing from Becker’s list, it was because “even before this new example of our aspirations he has already demonstrated such great independence that, even without wanting it and without working toward that goal, he stands there as of his own accord as the principal voice of this poetry in music, without, however, having sidestepped beautiful prose in art.”32 In other words, however much Becker was alive to Mendelssohn’s neoclassical romanticism, he—Becker—was championing the young fantasts at this particular moment and in their own particular forum.
The four “Effusive Letters” Schumann published in the third volume of his Neue Zeitschrift are “reviews” in an altogether more distinctive sense. They appeared under the headings “Eusebius to Chiara,” “[Chiara] to Eusebius,” “[Florestan] to Chiara,” and “[Serpentin] to Chiara” (Serpentin being Schumann’s fellow contributor and initial friend, Carl Banck). They wrote effusively not only about one another but also about the pleasures that were afforded by the current state of music in Leipzig and that provided an excuse for an exchange of views on musical poetry.
Among these pleasures was “early music.” When Clara Schumann, Mendelssohn, and Louis Rakemann played Johann Sebastian Bach’s Triple Concerto for three keyboards, Serpentin felt impelled to write to Chiara:
I found Eusebius resting his head on this sheet yesterday evening and sleeping soundly; he looked fit to be painted and kissed, as if he were still dreaming of Zilia’s concert, about which he was wanting to write to you. We are sending you the whole piece of paper. But don’t laugh at old Sebastian’s concerto for three keyboards, which Zilia played with Meritis and gentle Walt from the League of David, but be like Florestan, who said that it will be perfectly clear to one what kind of a wretch one is.33
(“You must change your life”—thus Rainer Maria Rilke was to end his sonnet “Apollo’s Archaic Torso” two generations later.)
It is fascinating to watch Schumann build up a small empire with his Neue Zeitschrift für Musik and how he fused reality and vision, poetry and politics, public and private concerns, and artistic ideals and self-promotion to create a miniature total artwork.34 No one else was able to do this—neither E. T. A. Hoffmann nor Jean Paul nor Heinrich Heine. The fact that he needed this performance art—and it is one that would have done credit to a member of the Fluxus movement—in order to lend a sense of stability to his own personality and that, as a stranger in the world, he could evidently communicate with it only in this way does not make it any less compelling. But it is hardly surprising that he was unable to maintain this level in the longer term and that the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik gradually acquired a greater normality and that Schumann himself wrote for it less and less frequently.
In this sense, Schumann’s opening remarks in the 1839 volume seem already to be a little more detached, their note of resolve notwithstanding. As such, they provide a suitable conclusion to the present chapter:
It may be possible to use German art to raise the level of our appreciation of all things German by drawing attention to older models or by preferring those younger and more talented artists whose most outstanding representatives one hears described as romantics—and this elevation may even now be seen as the goal of our aspirations. At all events, the recurrent theme that holds this thought together may be found in the history of the League of David, a league which, even if its appearances are restricted to the realm of fantasy, boasts members who are identifiable less by their outward insignia than by an inner similarity. In the future, too, they will seek to raise a bulwark against mediocrity in word as well as in deed.34
Schumann in 1839, lithograph by Joseph Kriehuber, a portraitist in great demand in Vienna at this time. It was commissioned by the publishing house of Mechetti, which between 1839 and 1841 published five of Schumann’s works: the Arabesque, op. 18; the Blumenstück (Flower Piece), op. 19; the Humoresque, op. 20; the four Nachtstücke (Night Pieces), op. 23; and the Heine Liederkreis (Song Cycle), op. 24. Schumann himself later said that “none of my portraits is of much value, with the possible exception of Kriehuber’s” (Briefe. Neue Folge 317). (Photograph courtesy of the Robert Schumann Museum, Zwickau.)
CHAPTER 4
The Early Piano Pieces
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.
Letter to Clara Wieck, April [15,] 18381
Composing is not the same as composing. In the case of the young Schumann it makes sense to distinguish between two fundamentally different attitudes, the first naïve and practical, the second reflective in the highest degree.
Children sing and, when they have a chance to do so, they pick out little tunes on an instrument. Here we see an aptitude for a naïve type of composing that is lost if it is not encouraged or gradually channeled into more practical forms of composition. Until Beethoven’s day composition was primarily a craft that required an adherence to traditional rules. The simple pleasure that the innocent listener may derive from Mozart’s music rests not least on the fact that this music clearly follows certain rules while transcending them in an altogether inspired way: the composer does not strike at the very foundations of music as defined at that time but seeks, rather, to build his musical visions upon those foundations. When seen from Mozart’s standpoint, composers learned to write music much as they learned any other trade, while gradually adding new elements of their own.
Much the same appears to have been the case with the young Schumann, at least as far as his intentions were concerned. True, he had little in the way of regular composition lessons but took his cue, as if of his own accord, from the models that he found all around him—and he was by no means unsuccessful in this regard. As we have already noted, he was eighteen when he sent some of his songs to Gottlob Wiedebein, asking the latter to cast an eye over them. The response was so positive that he felt encouraged to turn his hand to “proper” symphonies, overtures, piano concertos, and string quartets, and did indeed make a start on a number of such projects. The best-known product of these early attempts at composition is the opening movement of the unfinished Zwickau Symphony, a movement that was performed on no fewer than three occasions in 1832–33.
Although a writer as knowledgeable about Schumann as Peter Gülke has plausible reasons for hailing this early attempt at a symphony as a “stroke of genius,”2
there is no denying Schumann’s debt to Mozart and Beethoven. No less obvious is the way in which for whole sections he does little more than juxtapose compositional set-pieces. He himself expressed the view at this time that many years of study would have been necessary if he were to have had any lasting success in this genre, but this—he believed—would also have meant that he would not have found his own voice as quickly as he did. And it was this that took priority, as is clear from the note of irritation in the lines that he addressed to Clara Wieck in January 1839: “Don’t on any account call me Jean Paul the second or Beethoven the second again; if you do, I really could hate you, even if only for a moment; I want to be ten times less than others but be something in my own right; please don’t call me etc. etc. any more.”3
Schumann wanted to be an original genius, a category introduced into artistic discourse by the Sturm und Drang movement of the previous century and one which in the context of the history of music first proved to be decisive in discussions on Beethoven, whose works reveal the qualitative leap from a form of composition that had largely conformed to social expectations and been regarded as a craft to a type of creativity according to which every work by a composer had at least to equal what had gone before it in terms of its originality, even if it could not surpass it. Whereas Haydn wrote over one hundred symphonies, Mozart completed only a little over forty, while Beethoven gave each of his symphonies such a distinctive profile that nine had been the limit for him. This was no longer the age of absolutism, when two dozen sandstone putti, standing outside in the park, had become so weather-beaten that after two generations they had had to be replaced as a matter of course. Now nine masterly bronze busts were displayed inside a museum, where a tenth could no longer be added. At least that is how Brahms viewed the situation regarding the symphony when he exclaimed at the age of almost forty: “I shall never write a symphony! You have no idea how someone like me feels when he can always hear a giant marching along behind him.”4