Robert Schumann: The Life and Work of a Romantic Composer

by Martin Geck

  In general, there are good reasons Mendelssohn decided not to include explanatory headings with his Songs Without Words for these works bear no trace of Schumann’s unbridled desire to lend each of his pieces a unique and unrepeatable set of characteristics, even at the risk of leaving them difficult to categorize. For the most part, the Songs Without Words can be ascribed to a particular kind of “affect” or emotion: “wild,” “lively,” “elegiac,” “chorale-like,” and so on. To duplicate these emotions by means of titles would risk reducing these pieces to the level of salon music. Although the buyer may suspect what to expect from them, he or she would feel no real desire to explore them any further. The opposite is the case with the Kinderscenen, in which the headings stir childhood memories and make us curious to see how these memories may be reflected in “art music.” And inasmuch as these miniatures may last only a matter of a few seconds and can scarcely be reduced to traditional models, listeners may be able to make good use of such hints.

  This also applies to “Dreaming,” which is less conventional than it seems at first sight. Admittedly, it is the most self-contained and compact of the pieces that make up the Kinderscenen and to that extent is comparable to one of Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words, with the result that it does not necessarily require an explanatory heading. And yet, however clear its form may appear to be, its inner life is so rampantly luxuriant that nonspecialist listeners will be able to respond to it chiefly on an emotional level—at least to the extent that they are willing to engage with the “rare state of mind” implied by the title.

  The specialist reader may be reminded of a diary entry in which the young Schumann discusses “dreams” and “fantasy” at length: “Notes in themselves cannot really paint what the emotions have not already painted.”39 And we may imagine Schumann improvising and dreaming at the piano, just as he saw himself when beginning a review of Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words: “Who has not sat at an upright piano in the fading light (a grand piano often seems to strike too courtly a note) and unwittingly sung a quiet tune while improvising?”40

  But what do our feelings “paint” in the case of “Dreaming”? And what does the music say about this particular waking dream? At stake here is the contradiction between our experience of natural beauty and the futile longing of the romantic artist who yearns to merge with that beauty as a single entity. Natural beauty is found in any song that is written in a well-balanced ternary form, with a melody that strives gently upward like the one at the start of “Dreaming.” Hans Pfitzner saw only this natural beauty when he observed: “What a miracle of inspiration! What can one say about it that would increase the understanding of a person who is not completely overcome by this melody, which constitutes the whole piece and in which inspiration and form practically coincide? Nothing.” And he goes on: “The person who cannot appreciate this will not be convinced by rational arguments, and there is nothing that can be said to counter their attacks except to play the tune and say: ‘How beautiful!’ What it expresses is as profound and clear, as mystical and as self-evident as the truth.”

  Writing in 1920, Pfitzner was defending artistic inspiration against the intellectualism of the Second Viennese School that he sought to pillory, but in doing so he overshot his target, not least when claiming: “Great works of art spring from the unconscious, not from the conscious.”41 What matters here is that in composing “Dreaming,” Schumann was deliberately flying in the face of the ideal of natural beauty; and even though it may initially have been “feeling” that “painted” this scene, as he himself expressed it, it is “understanding” that is subsequently needed here. Only by means of careful compositional calculation was Schumann able to achieve the metrical shifts that allow him to transform a phrase of four bars in 4/4 time—harmless enough on paper—into a sequence of bars in 5/4, 3/4, 2/4, 2/4, and 4/4 time. Even the initially failed attempts of the “Dream” melody to climax in the central section of the piece owe their cunctative impact to a compositional approach of considerable subtlety.

  It is this that the German writer on music Peter Gülke had in mind when he wrote, “Not least of the miracles of this piece is the fact that it brings together within the narrowest possible confines symmetries, repetitions, and linear procedures and yet can still appear to be dreamily aimless and purposeless.”42 Nothing like it is found in Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words, where there is no sense of contradiction between natural flow and constant congestion. I recall some of my own dreams in which I have tried in vain to resolve such contradictions, and although Schumann does not succeed in doing so, he does manage to integrate them in his music, initially through improvising and experimenting at the piano, but then in purposeful composition that does not shy away from several false starts before a successful and definitive version is found.

  At first sight, the series of four etchings Times of Day by the romantic painter Philipp Otto Runge create a wholly agreeable impression and from that point of view are comparable to the surface aspect of “Dreaming,” but Goethe’s commentary is worth quoting here, for these images “are a veritable labyrinth of obscure relationships, causing the observer to feel dizzy from the almost unfathomable nature of their meaning.” Exactly the same is true of Schumann’s “Dreaming”; we shall do justice to its title only by interpreting it in the context of the heading “Dream’s Confusions” from the Fantasiestücke op. 12.43

  This brings us back once again to the more general problem of the works’ headings. If performers and listeners take the title “Dreaming” seriously rather than treating it as a popular, romantic label, they will find it easier to fathom the piece’s deep structure, which tells us something about the heaviness of the dream. That this is no hair-splitting may be clear from a comment by the linguistic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein: the feeling that “It was a long, long time ago” is not typical of all instances of the concept of self-recollection, yet this feeling undoubtedly exists, and its most consummate expression, in Wittgenstein’s view, may be found in a piece from Schumann’s Davidsbündlertänze.44 Would Wittgenstein—an amateur music lover—have been able to tell this if he had encountered the piece in question without its heading, “As From a Distance”?

  Whereas this question must remain unanswered, there is no doubt about another, related phenomenon: Wittgenstein’s association of ideas certainly makes sense, but he could have made the connection only because the piece is short, in which respect it resembles the other miniatures from Schumann’s early cycles. Or, to put it another way, no composer would be able to sustain the feeling of “It was a long, long time ago” over an entire sonata movement or a whole symphonic movement without turning his initial idea into a wearisome program or simply remaining misunderstood. Only a fleeting idea can trigger the shock that Umberto Eco has defined as a decisive hallmark of the creative metaphor. It is, he says in this context, drawing on a language of peculiar vividness, a “perception catastrophe” triggered by the use of the metaphor.45

  It was in this spirit that Schumann broke a lance for “shorter” works in a review that he published in 1835 under the title “Shorter and Rhapsodic Works for the Pianoforte,” claiming that such music creates an impression “through the lightning flash of the mind, which must develop, control itself, and ignite all within the space of a moment.” Only rarely, he went on, did composers succeed in doing this: “All beauty is difficult, brevity the most difficult of all.”46

  Of course, the young Schumann was concerned not just with brevity but also with aphorisms, fragmentation, and rapid change, concerns he had already demonstrated in Papillons and Carnaval. But in the case of Papillons, the meters and periodic structures of dance forms had for the most part provided the listener with semantic clues, while a similar function had additionally been served in Carnaval by the programmatic titles. He adopted an even more radical approach in the Six Intermezzos op. 4: in spite of their title, these intermezzos were not inserted between other movements but are treated as compositions in which
dependence achieves a state of independence—the first time in the history of music that this had been done.

  Schumann originally intended to call these works “Pièces phantastiques.” In an essay titled “Loving Schumann,” Roland Barthes writes in a positively rhapsodic vein about their definitive title and the idea that is associated with it. He believes that Schumann’s music—not least as a result of the titles that he gave to his works—invariably points to reality:

  For Schumann the world is not unreal, reality is not null and void. [. . .] But this reality is threatened with disarticulation, dissociation, with movements not violent (nothing harsh) but brief and, one might say, ceaselessly “mutant”: nothing lasts long, each movement interrupts the next: this is the realm of the intermezzo, a rather dizzying notion when it extends to all of music, and when the matrix is experienced only as an exhausting (if graceful) sequence of interstices.

  In this context Barthes recalls the French writer on the aesthetics of music, Marcel Beaufils, who believed that the literary motif of the carnival was basic to Schumann’s early piano works: “The Carnival is truly the theater of this decentering of the subject (a very modern temptation) which Schumann expresses in his fashion by the carousel of his brief forms.”47

  Another Schumann expert, Hans Joachim Köhler, has described the Intermezzos as an “auto-psychologically oriented work.”48 His phraseology may be more cautious, but it amounts to much the same thing, for the “rare states of mind” reflected in Schumann’s music imply the experience of “decentering.” Anyone playing or listening to the Intermezzos is not only fascinated by the subtle riches of the music and by what, at the time, was the unique boldness of their language, they will also risk being shocked at the disjointed way in which the ideas are strung together.

  The situation is made additionally difficult by the speed at which most of these pieces are to be played and by the obsession with motific and thematic detail. Life, according to a comment that applies not only to the op. 4 Intermezzos, continues to evolve in intermezzos, which for their part are in a constant state of flux: the artist may try to capture every moment but he can never reach the famous heart of the matter or the core of his own being, for no such thing exists. In Schumann’s eyes, such a quest would be more profitably directed at Bach and Beethoven.

  The deconstructionist elements in Barthes’s view of Schumann are regarded by experts and music lovers alike as evidence of arrogant philosophizing. And yet it makes sense to treat Schumann as a composer who in spite of his profound desire for beauty and coherence in art was never satisfied with the mere semblance of meaning. It is also worth noting in this context that of his early piano works Schumann later gave his unqualified approval only to the Intermezzos op. 4 and the Toccata op. 7.

  Notwithstanding all the hard work that went into it, the Toccata is indeed a masterpiece of gestural concision within the narrowest confines. In Schumann’s day, the term “toccata” was used for a technically demanding concert study, but in his hands it acquired a sense of the fantastical and restless while retaining its element of extreme technical difficulty. Even so, the motoric unrest of the writing repeatedly reveals a charmingly songlike motif that bears a marked affinity not only to the motif associated with love’s bliss in the duet between Lohengrin and Elsa in act 3 of Wagner’s opera but also to Clara Schumann’s later song, “Er ist gekommen in Sturm und Regen,” more especially at the words “Wie konnt’ ich ahnen.” In the second section it is briefly supplanted by a two-bar krakowiak motif already heard in the lively opening bars but which for a time appears to go off the rails or at least to mutate into a galop or quick polka. The repeated notes in this passage have an almost uninhibited physicality to them, a feature rarely found in Schumann’s music. Toward the end of the piece, everything is brought back to an even keel, of course, and the piece’s toccata character is preserved.

  We may regard the Toccata op. 7 as a well-spiced piano study not worth making a fuss about, but we may also interpret it as a detailed record of Schumann’s “rare states of mind” at the piano: practicing double octaves like a man possessed, he could also see before his mind’s eye the figure of Clara who, ideally, was practicing the piano elsewhere in Wieck’s house at exactly the same time. Then more earthy elements clamor for attention: the memory of wild student pub crawls and dancing. There are even contemporary references; the krakowiak can be seen as a symbol of the Polish nation whose failed struggle to achieve independence exercised Europeans at the very time that the Toccata was being written. It also inspired the young Wagner to write his Polonaises in the winter of 1831–32.49

  At some point or other almost every composer feels the urge to tackle large-scale forms: even the miniaturist Anton Webern was mildly shocked to discover when rehearsing a new work that it had turned out shorter than he had imagined when writing it. Schumann, too, was still in his mid-twenties when he admitted his high opinion of the sonata as a genre, reckoning it to be a “higher form of art” and associating hard work and “lofty aspirations” with it.50 On the other hand, he had absolutely no wish to be thought of as a classical composer, which is why he staked everything on originality in his First Piano Sonata in F-sharp Minor op. 11, a piece first performed in 1835 and notable above all for its daring harmonies: which other contemporary work, for example, modulates with such exceptional rapidity?

  And yet both the tonal excesses and the interpolated passages of recitative illustrate a tendency on Schumann’s part to explore the world of the piano fantasy, a genre to which he was to turn explicitly only some years later in his op. 17 Fantasy in C Major, a three-movement work full of allusions of a private and professional kind. In a letter to Clara, Schumann described its opening movement as “arguably the most passionate thing I’ve ever written: a profound lament for you.”51 Apart from this pointer to the “unhappy summer of 1836,”52 the work also contains a contemporary artistic point of reference in that Schumann planned to donate the fee for it to a Beethoven Monument that Liszt was planning. Both motifs—Schumann’s love of Clara and his love of Beethoven—are encapsulated in four lines by Friedrich Schlegel that he prefaced to the work in the form of a motto:

  Durch alle Töne tönet

  Im bunten Erdentraum

  Ein leiser Ton gezogen

  Für den der heimlich lauschet.

  [Through every sound there sounds/In earth’s most motley dream-world/A sound so soft and drawn/For him who lists in secret.]

  Of course, we need to listen carefully and also know our Beethoven to be able to identify this “soft sound” that permeates the C Major Fantasy, for it is a phrase from the beginning of “Nimm sie hin denn, diese Lieder” (Take these songs then) from Beethoven’s song cycle An die ferne Geliebte op. 98.53 The element of “secrecy” consists in the fact that Beethoven’s theme is initially so well concealed that we can only suspect its identify. In its original form, the melody becomes audible only in the Adagio at the end of the movement. In other words, Schumann “unveiled” Beethoven musically before the actual Beethoven Monument was unveiled in Bonn in 1845. But the idea behind the work extends beyond Schumann’s reason for writing it. Although the movement is nominally in C major, it tends for the most part to avoid this key rather than seeking it out, and it is not until the end that it achieves the unambiguity of the sort of C major that allows us to regard Beethoven as a figure of light. In other words, Beethoven’s music helped Schumann to survive the dark times in the world of contemporary culture, while Clara functions as an anchor in the face of existential problems.54

  The Fantasy op. 17 was composed immediately before Schumann wrote his Kreisleriana: Fantasien für Piano-Forte op. 16, in which he created a large-scale work of undeniable greatness, not by appealing to an icon in the history of music but by discovering that greatness within himself and by drawing on a genuinely romantic spirit that was uniquely his own.

  Intermezzo III

  “No, What I Hear Are Blows”

  In Schumann’s Kreisleria
na (Opus 16; 1838), I actually hear no note, no theme, no contour, no grammar, no meaning, nothing which would permit me to reconstruct an intelligible structure of the work. No, what I hear are blows: I hear what beats in the body, what beats the body, or better: I hear this body that beats.1

  It is with these words that Roland Barthes begins his essay “Rasch,” echoing others that E. T. A. Hoffmann had once placed in the mouth of his Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler:

  There often flares up inside me an insane and dissolute longing for something that I am seeking outside myself by means of restless activity because, hidden away inside me, there is a dark secret, a confused and mysterious dream about a Paradise of supreme contentment that even my dream cannot name but only suspect.2

  Of course, Barthes’s aim was not to imply that Schumann’s Kreisleriana has a program derived from E. T. A. Hoffmann. Rather, he “reads” the work in an intensely “corporeal” way and in doing so eschews all other attempts to fathom its meaning. Certainly, Schumann’s op. 16 stands apart from his other early piano works in that—apart from its title—it contains no obvious allusions to the figure of the fantastically insane Kapellmeister to whom Hoffmann had first raised a memorial in his collection of essays Kreisleriana and, later, in the aforementioned Tomcat Murr.

  Unlike Papillons, Carnaval, and the Davidsbündlertänze, Kreisleriana could get by without its title or at least survive as a “Fantasy,” “Humoresque,” or “Arabesque”—in every case in a typically Schumannesque sense. What is so magnificent about this thirty-minute work, which is made up of eight pieces, is that although it is concerned with the “rare states of mind” to which Schumann returned again and again, that concern is remote from any obvious, tangible program.