Robert Schumann: The Life and Work of a Romantic Composer

by Martin Geck

  The young Schumann had neither the staying power of a Brahms nor Brahms’s specific goals. Although he wanted to honor tradition, he had no intention of serving it. Rather, his aim was to engage in active warfare against the philistines. David had only one weapon with which to defeat Goliath—his sling. This presupposed reduced forces, initially the piano, and small-scale forms such as dance movements and sets of variations. Of course, a writer of symphonies could also play the part of David, and Schumann would undoubtedly have conceded that his colleague Hector Berlioz had marched into battle against the French philistines with his Symphonie Fantastique emblazoned on his banner. For the present, however, this was not Schumann’s way. Only when improvising at the piano did he feel that his life had achieved a genuine authenticity—it was as if he had switched to the instrument after reading the works of E. T. A. Hoffmann and Jean Paul and had translated into music the states of mind that he found in those writings. In making these states his own and restoring them to their rightful place in an uncomprehending and soulless world, he set an appropriate example.

  “It would be a petty art that had only sounds but no language or signs for states of mind,” Schumann wrote in his “Book of Thoughts and Poems,” in which he made sporadic entries between 1831 and 1833.5 And in spite of the respect that he felt for Chopin and Mendelssohn, he was bound to admit that on this point his musical heroes from the past had made greater advances than many musicians of the present day, with their tendency toward shallowness:

  When I think of the supreme kind of music, as bequeathed to us by Bach and Beethoven in a number of their works, and when I speak of the rare states of mind that the artist is to reveal to me, and if I were to demand that with every one of his works he takes me a step further into the spirit world of art and if I were to demand poetic depth and novelty everywhere, in individual detail and in more general terms, I should have to search for a long time.6

  The “artistic roots” of counterpoint were so well hidden in the fugues in Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier7 that we can appreciate them as “character-pieces of the highest kind and in part as truly poetic creations.”8 As a result, Schumann was delighted to note, “an observer with no mean knowledge of music could think that a fugue by Bach was a study by Chopin—an assessment that is a credit to both composers.”9 If Schumann held Beethoven in such high regard, it was not least because of his late quartets, which seemed to reveal to him “rare states of mind” in a particularly undisguised form. Nor should we forget his admiration for Schubert, whose A Minor Piano Sonata D. 845 inspired him to write about it as follows a decade after its composition:

  The first section is so calm, so dreamy that it may move us to tears; and yet it is so simply constructed out of only two pieces that one has to admire the sorcerer who was able to dovetail and contrast them in so strange a way. [. . .] If we wanted to say anything about the inner nature of Schubert’s works in general, it would be this: he has musical sounds for the subtlest emotions and ideas and even for events and for the conditions in which we live. Myriad as the forms human thought and desire can take, Schubert’s music reflects them all. What he sees with his eyes and touches with his hand is transformed into music; he casts down stones, and from them living human forms rise up just as was the case with Deucalion and Pyrrha. He was the most distinguished composer after Beethoven who, as the mortal enemy of all philistinism, created music in the highest sense of the word without regard for strict mathematical forms and without the use of contrapuntal aids.10

  But how could a beginner who even at the piano did not write like Bach, Beethoven, and Schubert, for example, find a suitable language for his own “states of mind”? For Schumann, this was not so much a technical question involving the rules of composition as one that raised wider aesthetic issues. He had to mature as a romantic and find his own tone of voice. Bach, Beethoven, and Schubert wrote in a “romantic” style without being aware that they were doing so. The age of the “neoromantics” had now dawned, to quote the title of a novel by one of Schumann’s artistic friends, Julius Becker. And whereas Beethoven had been around thirty years old when he had decided to strike out in what he himself described as a “new direction,” Schumann was only twenty when he started to look for the key that would turn him into a romantic composer.

  His “Leipzig Book of Life” contains diary entries for the months between May and August 1831 and includes an invitation to the members of the League of David that was summoned into existence at this time: “Step closer & behave in a real romantic way!”11 But the diary was also concerned with the question of actual composition. According to Florestan/Schumann, the composer’s new (and unfinished) piano concerto was his first work to be written in a style “that tends toward the romantic.”12

  Looking back on his life from the vantage point of 1846, Schumann was inclined to date his “birth” as a romantic composer to an even earlier period: “I still have a very clear memory of a passage in one of my compositions (1828) that I told myself was romantic, a passage in which a spirit at variance with the older character of music first revealed itself to me, and a new life of poetry seemed to open itself up to me.”13 As Schumann explained, the work in question was the Trio from the Scherzo in his early Piano Quartet in C Minor, allowing us to examine the passage to which he was referring, even if it ultimately fails to embody the sort of “aha” experience that Schumann himself ascribed to it. More enlightening in this regard is a glance at his earliest published works, for these are surely unequivocal examples of the poetic and romantic music that Schumann wanted to bequeath to the world.

  He could hardly have made a more impressive or auspicious start than with his Abegg Variations op. 1, an undervalued work that appeared in print at the end of 1831. And while it is true that the work was the result of a series of experimental dry runs on Schumann’s part, it magnificently illustrates his future “program” and with astonishing light-handedness combines what he wanted to achieve with what he could achieve at this particular point in time.

  What he wanted to achieve is summed up in a motto included in his “Book of Thoughts and Poems”: “I don’t like those people whose lives are at variance with their works.”14 His aim, then, was to write a piece that grew out of his own experience but which brought a poetic element to the quotidian in the spirit of his idol Jean Paul and placed it in a romantic light. Among these everyday experiences was his work on Moscheles’s Alexander Variations op. 32 during his months in Heidelberg in the winter of 1829–30. It was an effortful exercise that took him to the very limits of his abilities as a pianist and left him wondering if it would not be more satisfying to write a set of piano variations of his own rather than playing those by another composer. The sequence of two notes, A–B-flat, that occurs in the Alexander Variations returns, therefore, in the Abegg Variations as something uniquely his own.

  During his time in Heidelberg, Schumann also became friendly with fellow student August Lemke, who was an admirer of Meta Abegg, a pianist highly regarded in court circles. Although Schumann appears to have had little contact with this daughter of a town councilor from Mannheim, he was evidently fascinated by her family name, which he translated directly into music. As such, he seems to have been the first nineteenth-century composer to play with the letters of the musical alphabet in this way, a game almost certainly inspired by Jean Paul’s Flegeljahre, in which a comic piano tuner draws Walt’s attention to the fact that his surname, Harnisch, is “musical.”

  Schumann was aware, of course, that he had a famous predecessor in this field, Johann Sebastian Bach having used the letters of his name—in German nomenclature B–A–C–H = B-flat–A–C–B—in the unfinished Contrapunctus XIV of his Art of Fugue. Imitators soon followed. For his part, Schumann was fortunate that the name “Abegg” generated a sequence of notes that produced a highly original waltz theme rather than the awkward fugue subject generated by Bach’s name. The fact that the theme also sounded attractive in retrograde—that is, the notes are
played in their reverse order—merely added to the motif’s appeal. It was neither a “simple” waltz nor “simple” salon music that was coaxed from this material but music with a multiple perspective.

  Schläft ein Lied in allen Dingen,

  Die da träumen fort und fort,

  Und die Welt hebt an zu singen,

  Triffst du nur das Zauberwort.

  [A song’s asleep in everything/That dreams inside our heads unheard./And so the world will start to sing/If you can find the magic word.]

  Joseph von Eichendorff published these lines under the eloquent title “Wünschelrute”—a magic wand that will make the wisher’s dreams come true. And all of us who can relate to the young Schumann’s zest for life will find that this metaphor is by no means exaggerated: although he was able at this period to compose with an elegance whose effortlessness he later lost, there was always a depth to what he wrote. It was with a secret delight that he sought to invest his work with a certain mystique by dedicating it to the nonexistent figure of the “Comtesse Pauline d’Abegg.” But even when Schumann’s mother expressed her bemusement at his fictitious dedication, Schumann struck a fantastical, cryptic note, claiming that “the countess is an old bag of twenty-six, very intelligent and musical but haggard and ugly.”15 Only as part of such a puzzle does the work of art come into its own.

  It is not only the dedication to a fictitious person that causes confusion, for the music, too, opens up a whole range of new and bewildering perspectives. As we have already observed, Schumann’s thoughts were full of Moscheles’s Alexander Variations during the final stages of the work’s composition, and there are also echoes of Chopin’s variations on Mozart’s duet “Là ci darem la mano.” Even though he could not compete with the much younger Clara Wieck when it came to performing the piece, he was still determined to demonstrate what he was capable of achieving as a composer, just as he would have wanted to prove to his contemporary Chopin that he was in no way his inferior when it came to lightness of tone and musical poetry.

  In short, Schumann wanted to ensure that a common- or garden-variety name should become a “magic word” that now took on a life of its own in his music; his “companions” on the piano—Moscheles and Chopin—were to accompany him in his music, too; this particular work was to be poetic and brilliant; and it was to hold up a mirror to rare states of mind and be acceptable in the salon. The best possible proof that this is the case may be found in the fact that the listener is only vaguely aware of the amount of thought that went into the work but never smells the midnight oil. Listeners do not need to decode the five-note motif A–B-flat–E–G–G, nor do they have to know the variations by Moscheles and Chopin to be impressed by Schumann’s piece, which lasts between seven and eight minutes in performance. Even the way in which Schumann varies his theme is original, for whereas Moscheles and Chopin operate along entirely traditional lines, taking a complete theme as their starting point and for the most part retaining its harmonic, melodic, and metrical patterns, Schumann adopts a far freer approach in keeping with the heading of his final movement, “alla Fantasia.”

  Following in the footsteps of his revered Bach, Schumann can introduce his five-note theme wherever and however he likes. And when he does so as furtively as is the case in the first variation, where the theme appears in the inner parts, then the result has an undeniable “romantic” charm to it. And much the same is true of the gradual disappearance of the A–B-flat–E–G–G theme toward the end of the final movement, where Schumann sets the pianist the task of playing a chord made up of all five notes and of then successively releasing each note in turn. Deleted from later editions, this playful device may pass the listener by, but it warns the performer against treating the piece as no more than harmless fun.

  Although the Abegg Variations op. 1 may be less multilayered than many of the later piano pieces, they are nonetheless entirely typical of Schumann, and if the writing does not yet contain as many of the luxuriant arabesques that are to be found in Kreisleriana, for example, the formal design tends to recall a succession of independent fantasies rather than a set of variations rigidly constructed around a single theme. One element that is completely new and that even the young Chopin had yet to match is the way in which the ever-present virtuosity is introduced into piano writing of mercurial and almost nervous sensitivity, with a constant crossing and interlocking of left and right hands—not just spatially but metrically and rhythmically, too. What is at stake here is not parity between the two hands, for Bach had already achieved this in his keyboard works, nor even the tendency for the two hands to drift apart such as we find in Beethoven’s late piano music but the tiny shifts and little games of hunting and harrying that turn the actions of playing and listening into a high-wire act without a safety net and force the performer to keep on striving to maintain his or her balance.

  This is not intended to suggest that these acrobatics dominate the work to the exclusion of all else. As is only appropriate with musical poetry of this order, the narrative elements are fully able to hold their own, encouraging a sensitive writer on Schumann like Hans Joachim Köhler to describe the second variation, with its “basso parlando,” as an “undisguised love scene without witnesses” and to hail it as “both the most poetic and at the same time the most stylistically advanced section of the work.”16

  It may have been the Abegg Variations that Moscheles had in mind when he wrote in his diary in 1836:

  The finger acrobatics have a place in Thalberg’s new works, which I am currently playing through; but for wit, I turn to Schumann. With him, romanticism strikes me in such a novel light and his genius is so great that I am bound to keep immersing myself in his works in order to weigh up the qualities and weaknesses of this new school in an accurate set of scales. He has also sent me his recently published sonata “Florestan and Eusebius” with the flattering remark that I alone can properly review it and would I mind doing so for his new music journal in Leipzig?17

  In referring to “weaknesses,” Moscheles may have been thinking of an aspect of Schumann’s piano pieces that is more prominent in his twelve-part Papillons op. 2, which appeared in print in 1832, than in his op. 1: his willful tendency to indulge in terse and aphoristic formulations which, compositionally speaking, may be traced to Beethoven’s late quartets, while their poetologic influence is clearly Jean Paul. There is nothing here to appeal to listeners addicted to harmony and enamored of easily accessible narrativity, still less for lovers of beautiful, fully rounded forms, hence a diary entry dated May 28, 1832, following a musical soirée in the Wieck household: “Papillons seems not to have put the company in the picture—they looked at each other in a strange way & were unable to grasp the rapid shifts in it. Also, Clara played it less well than she did on Saturday & must have been mentally & physically tired.”18 Schumann knew his audience’s taste, but when he wrote to his mother in the context of Papillons and announced, “Now I’m starting to understand my existence,”19 he may also have meant that he felt most himself in music that was more difficult to grasp. But he was also building a bridge between his music and the listener: “There are secret states of mind in which a word from the composer can lead more speedily to a better understanding and for which the listener is bound to be grateful.”20

  It was in this spirit that he replied to the critic Ludwig Rellstab, offering to help him to understand Papillons after Rellstab had dismissed the Abegg Variations in a fit of ironical contempt:

  If I am taking the liberty of adding a few words about the origins of Papillons, then this is less for the edification of the editor of Iris than for the poet and kindred spirit, Jean Paul, for the thread that is intended to bind them together is barely visible to the naked eye. Your Excellency will recall the final scene in Flegeljahre with its masquerade—Walt—Vult—masks—Wina—Vult dancing—exchange of masks—confessions—anger—revelations—hurrying away—final scene, and then the brother leaving. I have often turned over the final page, for the endi
ng seemed to me merely a new beginning—I was barely aware of being at the piano, and in this way one butterfly after another came into being.21

  This is the wording of Schumann’s letter as preserved in the draft that he copied out in a book specially designed for that purpose, and it fully reflects the work’s genesis. In his own private copy of Jean Paul’s novel he singled out eleven typical sentences and marked them with corresponding references to the first eleven movements of Papillons. The note “Pap. 3,” for example, appears next to a sentence about Walt looking around on the dance floor:

  But it was mostly a giant boot sliding around the dance floor that caught his attention, for the boot was wearing itself, which it continued to do until such time as a patriarchal schoolmaster looked at it so earnestly and reprovingly with his ferule that it became confused, looking at itself and examining its carter’s shirt in the belief that it had committed some indiscretion.22

  This scene is particularly appropriate in the context of the third of the Papillons, for the movement begins with a dance tune that, earthy in character, is initially played by both hands in unison before being accompanied in a strikingly ungainly manner and finally appearing in canon, fortissimo. This canon is a splendid image for the giant boot that is placed inside itself, and at the same time it throws an important light on Schumann’s claim that he learned more about counterpoint from Jean Paul than from anyone else. There is something contrapuntal about a poetic and romantic style that evokes associations of mysteriously intricate, wildly luxuriant or simply bizarre phenomena that the philistine finds disconcerting.