by Martin Geck
We may perhaps extend the image of the funeral procession and turn it into a scene from a film: the two “episodes” that are inserted between the blocks of the rondo recall a camera panning to events on the edges of the main action. At the performance marking “espressivo ma sempre p,” we may imagine a small group of singers intoning a gently ecstatic hymn, and at the “Agitato” passage in the second episode we may think of a man gesticulating wildly in his desperate grief but being swallowed up by the funeral procession even as he does so.
Even if we were to disregard Tchaikovsky’s yet more flowery description of Schumann’s “marcia,” according to which the three main motifs embody “tragedy,” “a selfless willingness to endure the inevitable blows of fate,” and “rebellion on the part of a passionate soul shaken by the death of a much-loved friend,”9 such wordy explanations are bound to be embarrassing, not least because they ignore the compositional characteristics of the piece—in other words, those features that make it unique. On the other hand, they offer us a welcome lifeline, because everyone tolerably familiar with the encodings of classical music will perceive something vaguely similar and will therefore be able to conclude that even without an explicit program the movement is not an example of some academic art for art’s sake as defined by Liszt but follows a coherent narrative concept.
From the outset, the inspired main idea guarantees the movement’s narrativity. As we have already noted, this idea does not entirely meet the expectations that we bring to a typical funeral march, the usual characteristics of which are rendered so unrecognizable by Schumann that the listener reacts to the movement with apprehension and uncertainty. When the “marcia” motif finally collapses in on itself, exhausted, at the end, it becomes clear that we have been following a line of argument with narrative qualities to it.
The opening (top) and closing (bottom) passages in the first violin line in the second movement of the Piano Quintet in E-flat Major op. 44 (1842).
This runs counter to the movement’s underlying structure inasmuch as the rounded parataxis of its rondo form is turned into a narrative process. The German musicologist Hans Kohlhase has spoken, moreover, of the “imaginary simultaneities of impressions and emotions” that constitute the compositional “idea” behind the “marcia.”10 This aim is achieved by the work’s multiple perspectives, for Schumann not only evokes the idea of a funeral procession going its gloomy way, he also explores the individual anguish to which the mourners are abandoned, which he does in the form of the head motif of the C major episode:
The head motif in the first violin part in the C major episode from the second movement of the Piano Quintet in E-flat Major op. 44 (1842).
Schumann uses this motif more than twenty times within a very short space and at the same time makes it unequivocally clear that here, too, he is not playing any navel-gazing games with “neutral” musical material but heaving a series of recognizable sighs that pass from instrument to instrument like real human voices.
This procedure recalls elements in the works of Bach and Beethoven, Schumann’s self-declared models. They too were repeatedly successful at creating musical textures in which “objective” and “subjective” perspectives, the “universal” and the “particular,” and “form” and “content” asserted themselves in turn. If Liszt was not entirely wrong to regard Mendelssohn’s music as “typical of Leipzig,” he was doing Schumann’s piano quintet a disservice by attempting to tar it with the same brush. Helpless writers in the field of the aesthetics of music tend to locate Schumann’s outlook between “absolute music” and “program music.” But whereas the word “between” implies the idea of a compromise, Schumann may feel that in the case of his own compositions he inhabited a world beyond the categories of “absolute” music on the one hand and program music on the other.
A daguerreotype of Schumann, taken in the Hamburg studio of the photographer Johann Anton Völlner in March 1850 at the request of publisher Julius Schuberth. Three daguerreotypes were taken on this occasion. They represent our only surviving photographic record of the composer. Clara spoke in this context of a “glorious likeness” (Litzmann 2:208). She later loaned the original to the artist Eduard Bendemann, with whom she was friendly, and he prepared a charcoal drawing from it. Schumann is depicted here in a melancholic attitude—the sort of attitude that had become a topos with Dürer’s famous copper engraving Melencolia I. It would be interesting to know if it was Schumann himself who chose to adopt this posture in Völlner’s studio or whether it was suggested to him by the photographer. Whatever the answer, the image was soon being reproduced in all manner of different media, with the result that from an early date it left its mark on public perceptions of Schumann as a “melancholy” figure. (Photograph courtesy of the Robert Schumann Museum, Zwickau.)
CHAPTER 9
The Dresden Years (1845–50)
Ah yes—to tell my music all about the anguish and joy that animate this age of ours is a gift which I feel has been conferred on me rather than on many others. And the fact that you sometimes inform people of the extent to which my music is rooted in the present and that it seeks anything but euphony and pleasant entertainment pleases me and encourages me to aspire to higher things. [. . .] I have worked a very great deal throughout this whole period; never have I felt more impelled to do so, never was it so easy for me. But it was my most recent marches [op. 76] that gave me the greatest pleasure.
Schumann to Franz Brendel, June 17, 18491
Following his return from Russia in May 1844, Schumann found himself unable to settle in Leipzig, which no longer felt like home to him. Against this background, the fact that he soon gave up the editorship of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik may not be particularly significant, for the move was long overdue. Yet it seems to have rankled with him that in spite of his successes with his First Symphony and Paradise and the Peri he was not considered a serious candidate to replace Mendelssohn at the Gewandhaus. In any event, however, it was none of these factors that persuaded him to move from Leipzig but an acute physical and mental crisis that became worse during a visit to Dresden in October 1844. “Robert couldn’t sleep at all,” Clara noted in her diary. “His imagination painted the most terrible pictures, in the morning I generally found him sobbing, he’d given up completely.”2 Since the couple’s return to Leipzig would have brought only further agitation, they agreed to settle in Dresden for the time being and rented a ground-floor apartment at 6 Waisenhausstraße.
A farewell concert for the couple took place at the Gewandhaus on December 8, 1844, when the Piano Quartet op. 47 received its first performance, with Clara at the piano. We do not know who else was involved. Conversely, surviving records indicate that the quasi-public concerts that formed part of the examinations at the Leipzig Conservatory that Mendelssohn had helped to establish in 1843 and where Schumann himself taught the piano part-time for several months were attended by as many as eight hundred people, an indication of the outstanding role that music played at this time in public awareness in the city.
Since even serious writers on Schumann sometimes give the impression that things were generally more “difficult” in Dresden and the couple’s marriage came under strain, it is worth casting a look at the family’s situation at this time. During the Schumanns’ five years in Dresden, four children were born to them: Julie, Emil, Ludwig, and Ferdinand. Although Schumann’s diary entries are not the best guide to the atmosphere within the family, they nevertheless attest to the fact that he devoted his love and attention to his growing brood of children.
He related to his eldest daughter best: “In the afternoon with Marie to the Linkesches Bad—happy with the child,” he noted on March 19, 1845.3 “A volume of ‘Children’s Melodies’ for piano solo for Marie,” a second entry reads, this one dated early April 1846 and already adumbrating the later Album für die Jugend.4 The entry for Easter Day 1845 reads: “First shoots of green grass—the cherry trees already in blossom—in my hand a nestling child—we
had a really enjoyable walk. In the wood there were beautiful butterflies; I caught a few Camberwell beauties for M[arie], but then we let them go again. The happy days of childhood—one relives them in one’s children.”5 “Went for a walk to the Prater with Marie,”6 we read in December 1846 in the context of Schumann’s visit to Vienna. “In the afternoon with the children to the Hegereiter [a local hostelry],” runs the entry for April 14, 1847.7
The family went on regular walks to the great park that lay close to their Dresden apartment. They also rode the carousel on the Vogelwiese and took boat rides on the Elbe. And as soon as the younger children could walk they were taken sledging and encouraged to go on country walks to pick flowers.8 Their birthdays were marked in various ways. And shortly before they moved to Düsseldorf they watched the English balloonist Henry Coxwell descend to earth by parachute.
Throughout their time in Dresden, Clara was almost constantly pregnant, adding to Schumann’s worries, but in spite of his own problems he was always able to prove an attentive husband. His housekeeping book includes a detailed note of all that he bought for her twenty-seventh birthday: “1 silk-lace shawl, 1 handkerchief, 6 bottles of eau de Cologne, 3 tablets of soap, 1 purse, 1 bottle of sauce, 1 melon, flowers, 1 bottle of Lößnitz champagne, ice cream, medallion, cake.”9
For her part, Clara continued to bestow tokens of her affection on her husband. On one occasion she surprised him by presenting him with a copy of a painting that had caught his attention during a visit to Berlin: a portrait of Princess Elisa Radziwill as a winged peri painted by Mendelssohn’s brother-in-law, Wilhelm Hensel. “For as long as I can remember, the picture stood on Mother’s piano,”10 Eugenie recalled, her reminiscences centering for the most part on Clara’s years of widowhood.
In the Waisenhausstraße in Dresden, a female cook and a nursery maid helped with the household chores, which included entertaining the more than two hundred visitors who called on the Schumanns over the years and whose names are recorded in their Dresden diaries. Occasionally there was a party atmosphere. The Leipzig concertmaster Ferdinand David recalled one such evening:
Johannisberger and Marcobrunner wine flowed freely. Madame Schumann was forever dragging in bottles, Schumann gestured to us that we should drink, while he himself set the best possible example, and we all followed his lead. It was great fun, a genuine Schumannesque evening which, once all the ladies apart from Mme Schumann had left, finally ended amid a great deal of cigar smoke at half past two in the morning.11
But Clara’s role was not limited to that of a housewife and mother in thrall to her family, for she continued to support her husband in his own artistic endeavors, even though he rarely revealed what he was currently working on. In the spring of 1845, when he was practicing organ playing on the pedal pianoforte that he had built from his existing grand piano by adding a rented pedal-board, Clara followed suit, at least for a time. And last but not least, she also composed: her Preludes and Fugues op. 16 were the product of a lengthy period of intensive study of counterpoint, while her Piano Trio op. 17 was the high point of her chamber output. On October 2, 1846, she was happy to note in her diary: “There is nothing more enjoyable than to have composed something oneself and then to hear it played. There are a few attractive passages in the Trio and I think that formally too it is quite successful.”12
Clara continued to make frequent appearances in the concert hall and also performed at soirées both in Dresden and in neighboring Leipzig. There were additionally concert tours of greater or lesser duration that she undertook during her early years in Dresden, which included visits not only to central and northern Germany but also—in the winter of 1846–47—to Vienna, Brno, Prague, and Berlin.
The fact that travel is in itself an education does not need to be emphasized here, but it is worth recalling the many well-educated and artistically interesting men and women that Clara met through her husband. Apart from Meyerbeer, who was a red flag to a bull where the Schumanns were concerned, there was scarcely an eminent musician with whom they did not dine. Schumann’s encounters with writers such as Eichendorff, Freytag, Geibel, Grillparzer, Gutzkow, Hebbel, Hoffmann von Fallersleben, Reinick, Rückert, Stifter, and Auerbach generally included his wife, and in many cases it was she herself who made the arrangements. And then there were all the painters in Dresden and Düsseldorf, to whom we shall return in due course.
“Otherwise there are very few artists here,”13 Schumann complained to Mendelssohn six or so months after his arrival in Dresden. But by December 18, 1845, we find him writing to his friend: “We get together every week—Bendemann, Rietschel, Hüb[ner], Wagner, Hiller—Reinick.”14 Yet it is no accident that among the individuals named here Bendemann, Rietschel, and Hübner were painters or sculptors, while Reinick represented a cross between an artist and a poet.
One of the few musicians who was friendly with the Schumanns was Ferdinand Hiller, but he left for Düsseldorf in 1847, with the result that Schumann’s feelings of isolation were not entirely unfounded. In Leipzig, Mendelssohn had set the tone and helped the Schumanns to the best of his abilities, whereas the musical life of Dresden was dominated by the Court Opera, where Wagner held noisy sway. Although Wagner was fond of entering into long and even stimulating discussions with Schumann on questions of politics and the aesthetics of opera, he was ultimately unwilling to tolerate a rival on his own particular patch of turf.
In Leipzig—a city famous for its publishing houses—Schumann had occupied a key position as the editor of his own journal. Once he resigned that post, his wife was forced to realize that although Dresden enjoyed an international reputation as a city of the visual arts, it had neither a regular concert hall nor a symphony orchestra capable of standing comparison with that of the Leipzig Gewandhaus. This also made it more difficult to perform Schumann’s large-scale works, a point confirmed by the statistics for this period, which demonstrate that by the end of the century, Schumann’s symphonies had received around a hundred performances in Leipzig, but only around thirty-five in Dresden. On the other hand, these figures reveal that Schumann was not entirely ignored in Dresden, where he enjoyed considerable success with his First Symphony, Piano Quintet op. 44, and Paradise and the Peri. It was in Dresden, moreover, that his Piano Concerto in A Minor received its brilliant first performance on December 4, 1845, in the Hôtel de Saxe. The complete program of the concert, which took place under Ferdinand Hiller’s direction, was as follows:
Hiller’s Overture to a Comedy
Schumann’s Piano Concerto, with Clara Schumann as the soloist
An aria performed by Louise Franchetti
Chopin’s Ballade in A-flat Major played by Clara Schumann
Schumann’s Overture, Scherzo, and Finale
Mendelssohn’s Allegro brillante op. 92 for four hands, played from the autograph score by Hiller and Clara Schumann
Two Schumann lieder, “The Lotus Flower” and “The Nut Tree,” sung by Louise Franchetti
A Bach fugue, Adolf Henselt’s “Cradle Song,” and one of Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words played by Clara Schumann
The program for this concert—entirely typical of its period in terms of its random sequence of items—may serve to refute the view that for Schumann the year 1845 was a time of unmitigated disaster, as his diary entries might suggest. Rather, it is clear that in spite of his problems, Schumann continued to live his life and write music. He had learned to live with his crises—not until the very end was he to fail in this. Even so, the sheer number of emotional shocks he suffered during his early period in Dresden was nothing short of alarming. “What a terrible winter I’ve had and what total lassitude I’ve felt so that I was assailed by terrible thoughts and reduced to virtual despair,” he told Mendelssohn on July 17, 1845, while preferring not to go into detail. Instead, he reported that the situation was now looking “more favorable again,” perhaps as a result of his doctor’s advice to bathe in the Elbe.15 Within two weeks, however, his diary, which was increasing
ly assuming the function of a daily medical bulletin, was recording a “tendency to dizziness. Anxiety & restlessness, especially in my hands & feet—ragings in my limbs—not much appetite—pulse weak, easily agitated—pain in various places in my head—not violent but worrying.”16
A visit to Bonn that had been planned at a time of high spirits had to be canceled, preventing Schumann from attending the celebrations accompanying the unveiling of the monument to Beethoven that had been masterminded by Liszt. Instead, the couple remained in Saxony, and, in an attempt to distract Schumann, they traveled to Leipzig, Weimar, Rudolstadt. Schwarzburg, Saalfeld, Gera, Zwickau, Schneeberg, and Chemnitz. Back in Dresden, Schumann worked with Hiller on a scheme to establish a series of subscription concerts modeled on those in Leipzig: “Every year one Beethoven symphony, and decorations to the chapel ad libitum—more isn’t possible. Will the people in Leipzig ever support us?”17 This was the question that he put to Mendelssohn, and even though the project never really got going, it says much for Schumann’s initiative at this time that he was still prepared to make the effort.
And in spite of the “somber moods” that he felt were blighting his work as a composer in 1845 and 1846, his output remained respectable. As we have already noted, he began “by conceiving everything and working it out” in his head. It was a “very different way of composing” that he tried out first of all on piano pieces based on strict contrapuntal procedures.18 His great model was Bach, who in view of his own weaknesses was able to serve as a kind of character reference. As early as 1832 he had told his piano teacher Johann Gottfried Kuntsch that studying The Well-Tempered Clavier had a “morally invigorating impact on the whole person, for Bach was a man through and through; with him, there were no half measures, nothing sickly, everything was written as if for all eternity.”19