by Martin Geck
Wieck snapped only when he held in his hands a copy of the petition with which Clara, represented by her lawyer and urged on by Schumann, officially complained about Wieck’s refusal to give his consent to the marriage. This was in the fall of 1839. Wieck was evidently incapable of grasping that he had now been cast in the role of the accused. His attitude before this point is understandable even if it fails to gain our approval. In brief, he was worried that Schumann would be unable to provide for his daughter, that she would have to abandon her career, and that she would be obliged to relinquish her inheritance to her husband. It soon became clear that he was right on all three points, even if only in part. From a twenty-first-century standpoint we may also see him as a champion of women’s rights, for he was keen to ensure that his daughter was able to continue her artistic career at a time when it was usual for even well-known singers and instrumental virtuosos to retire from public life once they were married—whether they married out of love or because of the need to secure their financial future is beside the point.
On the other hand, Wieck’s motivation was by no means as noble as one writer has claimed in a recent study.20 While he was undoubtedly concerned for his daughter’s welfare and well-being, she was ultimately his most prized possession and he had no wish to see it reduced in value. Nor was he willing to share her with a husband who, however much of a genius he may have been, was nonetheless lacking in stolidity. Schumann fought back with all the means at his disposal, seeking to refute the charge that he was incapable of providing for a wife and, as a sign of his decadence, that he was immoderately fond of his tipple.
In any event Schumann was able to convince the court that his finances were sound and draw a veil over the fact that he had already drawn on much of the capital acquired from the various legacies that he had received from his father, mother, and brother Eduard. He was able to adduce character references and even to present himself to the court as the holder of a newly awarded doctorate, the faculty of music at the University of Jena having bestowed this title on him on February 24, 1840, in recognition of his services to music—as was not unusual at this time, the award was made in writing and without any further formalities, including even an examination of his abilities.
The court reached its decision on August 1, 1840, granting the couple permission to marry in church “following the usual publication of the banns.”21 Despite a promise made to Clara, Schumann persisted with his libel action, and in April 1841 Wieck was sentenced to eighteen days’ imprisonment. Although he did not serve the sentence, he was no longer a serious risk.
The wedding ceremony took place in Schönefeld, a village to the north of Leipzig, on September 12. The pastor was a school friend of the composer, Carl August Wildenhahn. Schumann had taken steps to ensure that his gift to the bride—a deluxe copy of his Myrthen op. 25 bound in red velvet—was ready in time for his stag night. An even more valuable present was a grand piano with English action worth five hundred thalers that he had smuggled into Clara’s apartment in July, since Wieck had made it clear that he was not allowed to play the beautiful instrument that the celebrated Viennese piano maker Conrad Graf had given her during her acclaimed visit to the city in 1838. When the Schumanns later acquired the piano, it was above all Schumann himself who played on it. After his death, it passed into the possession of Brahms.
The couple had asked that the wedding should be a quiet affair, and the guests who assembled that evening at the home of Emilie and Julius Carl danced “very little,”22 an abstinence in no way contradicted by an entry in Schumann’s housekeeping book, “1000 Fl. Rheinisch,”23 which refers not to the purchase of one thousand bottles of wine from the Rhineland, as a number of writers have speculated, but to the acquisition of stocks and shares worth a total of one thousand florins in Rhineland currency.
Clara finally had the means to keep house for herself and her husband. The previous December he had given her “a new and simple cookery book” written for housewives “without any previous knowledge of cookery.” He had it expensively bound, with a gilt inscription: “To My Wife, R. S.” A glance at the volume, which the Robert Schumann Museum in Zwickau has reprinted as a facsimile, indicates that Clara used it; underlined entries reflect the fact that she took account of the likes and dislikes that her husband had already itemized in the list that he drew up for his landlady Johanne Christiane Devrient.
The final entry in the diary that Clara kept as an unmarried woman is dated September 12:
My whole inner world was filled with gratitude for Him who has finally brought us together through so many reefs and rocks; it was my ardent prayer that it might please Him to keep my Robert for me for many, many years—ah, whenever I am assailed by the thought that I might one day lose him, my senses grow confused. [. . .] Now a new life is starting, a beautiful life, living for him whom one loves above all else, including oneself, but heavy duties lie upon me, too, and may Heaven grant me the strength to meet them faithfully like any good wife.24
The fact that the wedding ceremony took place on the day before Clara’s twenty-first birthday, while she was still a minor, can hardly have been an accident but must have been due to far-sightedness on the part of Schumann or his legal adviser. Although the date of Clara’s coming of age had played no material part in the preceding legal arguments, it was in Schumann’s interest to marry her while she was a minor, because he would then be able to dispose of her fortune in whatever way he liked. It was a point that had in fact already exercised him with peculiar urgency—he was sufficiently astute to plan for the future.
However much the subject of Clara may have dominated the years between 1835 and 1840, no chapter on the couple’s “probationary years” in Leipzig can ignore other important issues at this time. Schumann was no Beethoven, having to fight for custody of his nephew, and although his struggle for Clara was no less passionate, it did not inhibit his creativity in the way that Beethoven’s was affected over a period of many years. In Schumann’s case, crisis and creativity were by no means mutually exclusive, for loss led to a redoubling of effort. It was with justified indignation that he wrote to Clara in May 1838 to complain about her father’s jibes:
Your father calls me phlegmatic? Carnaval & phlegmatic—F-sharp Minor Sonata phlegmatic—loving such a young woman phlegmatic?! And you calmly accept that? He says that for six weeks I’ve written nothing for the paper—1) it’s not true 2) even if it were true, he knows what else I’ve been working on—where, ultimately, is all the material supposed to come from? I’ve so far supplied the paper with some eighty printed sheets of my own thoughts, not including all my other editorial work, I’ve also completed ten major compositions in two years—I poured my heart’s blood into them—I’ve also spent several hours a day studying Bach and Beethoven & much of my own music—I’ve dealt promptly with an extensive correspondence that was often very difficult and detailed—I’m a young man of twenty-eight, a quick-blooded artist who in spite of this has not set foot outside Saxony for the last eight years but has sat here quietly—I’ve been careful with my money and spent nothing on drink or horses but have quietly gone my own way.25
Schumann refers here to ten major piano pieces. By the date of his marriage to Clara, twenty-three separate opus numbers had appeared in print—all his early piano works, together with the Faschingsschwank aus Wien op. 26, which was not published until the beginning of 1841. In many cases, fewer than fifty copies of each of these works were eventually sold—his piano works were rarely performed even in the Leipzig music salon of Henriette Voigt, for all that she was well disposed to Schumann as a musician. It is clear from her unpublished diaries that between 1830 and 1837, Beethoven featured a hundred and ten times in her programs, and Mendelssohn sixty times. Schumann, by contrast, was represented only five times, with single performances of Papillons op. 2, the Fantasiestücke op. 12, Kinderscenen op. 15, the Toccata op. 7, and the Piano Sonata op. 22, the last of which was dedicated to Henriette Voigt. In spite of all this,
there were numerous positive reviews, not only in the Neue Zeitschrift but elsewhere, too. Mendelssohn, Liszt, and Berlioz, to name only the three most famous of Schumann’s colleagues, all expressed their admiration.
In 1840, the short-lived Blätter für Musik und Literatur published a review full of praise for a group of five composers said to have attracted attention “with their strains of romantic magic” in what “has become known as Young Germany”:
If I am to say anything brief but specific that I would ask my readers not to misconstrue, then Chopin is fond of the pithy and the emotionally charged, and also of the seamless legato; Henselt loves elfin playfulness, Thalberg a solemnity that is brilliant and wistfully solemn by turns, Schumann loves humorous depth, Liszt greatness, seriousness, and sublimity of style; but all of them love fullness and abundance.26
Similar comments may be found in six blue-bound volumes of press cuttings that Schumann collected between 1832 and 1851.
There were also, of course, critical voices. Carl Koßmaly, whom one tends to think of as a supporter of Schumann, had the following to say about the Fantasy in C Major op. 17:
Its eccentricity, arbitrariness, vagueness, and the nonclarity of its contours can hardly be surpassed. [. . .] To have recourse to a simile, the composer reminds us of a wealthy, distinguished man who, in the aristocratic conceit of making himself unapproachable, egotistically and stubbornly shuts himself off from the world, digs deep moats around his entire property, causes great hedges of thorn to be planted, warning shots to be fired, and traps to be laid, and so fences in and barricades himself that in the end people cannot help but be discouraged from making his acquaintance.27
These lines were written in 1844, at a time when—in advance of the bourgeois revolutions of 1848 and 1849—a fundamental change was taking place in musical aesthetics, as the romantic approach, now dismissed as unduly high-flown, was replaced by a modest classicism that Schumann, too, had come to accept. As a result, he reacted with remarkable mildness to Koßmaly’s review, which also contained a number of positive points: “Much about your essay delighted me beyond words; and I think you would react differently to various other points if we were to spend some time together.”28 In any event, it was Schumann himself who sent Koßmaly a “box of older compositions” as the basis for his review, adding:
You’ll easily discover what is immature and imperfect about them. Most of them are a reflection of my wildly agitated earlier life; man and artist always tried to express themselves at the same time with me; and I expect that this is still true of me, even now that I have learned to take greater control of myself, including my art. Your sympathetic heart will discover just how many joys and sorrows lie buried in this little pile of music.29
There is no doubt that Schumann’s early years in Leipzig witnessed many highs and lows. Clara’s frequent absences from the city meant that he led a typical bachelor’s life in which male friendships were of particular importance. Mendelssohn’s appointment as director of the Gewandhaus concerts in August 1835 struck him as a great boon—a stroke of luck not only for Leipzig but for Schumann, too.
Only a year older than Schumann, Mendelssohn took up his new post with tremendous enthusiasm, encouraging Schumann to believe that the new poetic age of which he had dreamed was finally dawning. Florestan’s report to Chiara on Mendelssohn’s Leipzig debut was couched in correspondingly poetic, not to say rhapsodic terms:
He sat down innocently at the piano, like a child, and captivated one heart after another, drawing them after him en masse, and when he finally set his listeners free again, they knew that they had flown past a number of islands inhabited by the Greek gods and had been set down again, safe and happy, in the Firlenz Hall.30
For Schumann, Mendelssohn was a prime example of the way in which a composer could write works in a poetic and romantic vein while at the same time upholding the German classical tradition. Mendelssohn championed contemporary composers and introduced his audiences to works by Chopin, Liszt, and Berlioz. But he also invested Beethoven’s symphonies with a new significance and helped with the rediscovery of Bach. After reading a text on astronomy, Schumann explained to Mendelssohn the theory that when seen through a telescope men and women on earth must “look like mites on a piece of cheese” to the “higher inhabitants of the sun,” prompting Mendelssohn to reply, “Yes, but I expect that The Well-Tempered Clavier would instill a certain respect in them.”31 And together with Louis Rakemann and Clara Wieck, whose services he was in any case fond of engaging, Mendelssohn performed Bach’s Triple Concerto BWV 1063 on November 9, 1835. It was Mendelssohn, too, who helped Schumann to enter the world of chamber music—it is unlikely that the “quartet morning” that he arranged in his rooms in 1836 in order for him to gain a deeper understanding of the works that had been submitted to the Neue Zeitschrift for review would have taken place at all without Mendelssohn’s help. In his Reminiscences of Mendelssohn, Schumann wrote that “his praise always meant the most to me—he was the ultimate authority.”32
It is perhaps fortunate that the Schumann of the 1830s was too much of the impetuous member of the League of David for him to take his cue from Mendelssohn as a composer. Even so, he observed what Mendelssohn was doing and thought about what he would compose at a later date—namely, his future symphonies and chamber music. Mendelssohn was also an amiable conversationalist to whom Schumann fondly refers in his diary. An entry like this one, dated January 29, 1838, is typical:
Cudgeled my brains over the ecossaise thing [a lost work]; in the afternoon snowballs at the window, & Mendelssohn came up—kind as ever—then went out for the first time in weeks to Connewitz—beautiful winter’s day—in the evening, rather bad concert by Stegmayer in the theater—Hope to wean myself away from Poppe [the landlord of the Coffe Baum, an old Leipzig coffee house much frequented by Schumann]—really not worthy of me. Expect to receive a letter from Vienna in a week’s time—I always think of her [Clara] with great affection.33
On another occasion, over lunch, Mendelssohn even took Schumann into his confidence, informing him that he was “engaged to be married” and was very much “bewitched” by the young woman in question.34
Even the briefest glance at Schumann’s diary for this period reveals that he was in contact with an astonishing number of people. To take a single example:
26th. Monday. Beautiful day. Meeting at my house, Lipinski, Mendelssohn, David, Mosewius, Ortlepp, Nowakowski, Reuter. Nothing comes of the quartet; but then Mendelssohn, David, & Grenser casually sight-read Schubert’s B-flat Major Trio—extraordinary. 27th, Tuesday morning. Stamaty back from Dresden, good-natured young man. Spend the whole week at dinner parties at the hotel with Lipinski, David, Nowakowski, Stamati [i.e., Stamaty], Mendelssohn & his sister, a lively, fiery Jewess. Dr. Frank, whose brother has arrived in town, is a small man of whom much may be expected. At the hotel in the evening told Mendelssohn about Rahel. His sister watched us in silence.35
Rahel is the title of the book that Karl August Varnhagen von Ense published in 1834 in memory of his late wife, the prominent literary hostess Rahel Varnhagen, who had died the previous year. Schumann had recently reprinted excerpts from it in his Neue Zeitschrift. Mendelssohn and his sister had both frequented Rahel Varnhagen’s salon in Berlin and undoubtedly would have taken a lively interest in Schumann’s remarks. In short, he was taken entirely seriously as a conversationalist.
A further entry in his diary, this time dated May 1838, commands our attention:
Sunday the 13th. Spoke at length with Prince Emil at the Museum—then Mozart concert, also attended by Walther von Goethe & Frau von Pogwisch—to the hotel with them, Frau von Goethe & the Caruses—then home—went for a walk in the evening—melancholia—I must have had the D—in me because, finding no one to talk to all evening I drank more than a bottle of wine & did the stupidest thing a day before C[lara]’s arrival. Bad hangover on Monday.36
Schumann’s successor as editor of the Neue Zeitschrift was Franz Bre
ndel, who recalled often seeing his predecessor at the Coffe Baum:
He used to sit sideways at the table so that he could rest his head on his arm, brushing away his hair, which kept falling down over his brow, his eyes half closed and dreamily inward-looking. But then he would suddenly come to life again, becoming talkative and animated, whenever there was an interesting exchange of ideas.37
From 1836, Schumann lived at the “Red College,” a complex of buildings belonging to the university. It was here that he was looked after by the aforementioned Johanne Christiane Devrient. In one of the two rooms was the grand piano on which he composed, improvised, and played the works of other composers, including, most notably, The Well-Tempered Clavier. On the wall above it hung portraits of Bach, Beethoven, Clara Wieck, and Ludwig Schunke, a friend who had died in 1834 at the age of only twenty-three. On his desk were statuettes of Paganini, Liszt, and Thalberg in virtuosic poses that were more or less ironically exaggerated. When the young pianist Amalie Rieffel visited him, she was struck not only by these “terrible caricatures,”38 but also by an engraving of a Raphael Madonna. Schumann’s fondness for this work may be surmised from an excerpt from Wolfgang Robert Griepenkerl’s poem, “The Sistine Madonna,” that he entered in a collection of mottos for the period 1836–38:
Genius! Wohl gibt es dunkele Stunde
Wo du den Künstler verläßt, dann schneidet das irdische Leben
Kalt wie die Luft des Körpers u. ganz erliegen die Kräfte:
Aber erlösest du ihn, dann steiget er mit riesigen Schritten
Ueber die irdische Welt.39
[Genius! There is doubtless a dark hour when you leave the artist; then earthly life cuts cold like the air of the body & strength fails completely: but if you redeem him, he will rise with giant steps above the earthly world.]