by Martin Geck
The nineteenth century had a word for this: “tone poem.” And there is no doubt that two things come together in Genoveva. On the one hand, Schumann was unable to conceive of music that was not poetic or at least poetically inspired, in the widest sense of that term. And on the other hand, this conviction could never produce program music or opera music in the narrower sense. Whereas Wagner was born to write music for the stage, Schumann declined to share his contemporary’s view that music was a woman who gave birth to the musical drama. For him, it was a force sui generis—autonomous and subservient to no one.
During the weeks when Genoveva was being politely applauded by the good people of Leipzig and encountering only skepticism in the wider world, the rest of the musical scene was looking forward with feverish excitement to a rather different event: the world premiere of Wagner’s Lohengrin, which was unveiled in Weimar in August 1850 under the direction of Franz Liszt, a man who at that time regarded himself, not without good reason, as a friend of both Wagner and Schumann. He had attended the first performance of Genoveva in Leipzig, as had Louis Spohr, Ferdinand Hiller, Ignaz Moscheles, and Niels Gade. But not even they could compete with the roster of distinguished musicians who attended the first night of Lohengrin two months later. Not only was the great Meyerbeer curious to know what his erstwhile protégé had produced, but literary figures such as Karl Gutzkow and Bettina von Arnim were anxious not to miss Wagner’s latest work. And music critics came from as far afield as London and Paris. And all of this was for a composer who was living in Switzerland as a political exile and who celebrated the first performance of his latest opera by accomplishing a personal feat of his own and scaling the Rigi.
Genoveva and Lohengrin have a remarkable number of points in common, starting with the national romanticism of their subject matter and continuing with the compositional method employed by both composers. Both men felt a common hatred of the hugely successful Meyerbeer and, turning their backs on number opera, took their first steps in the direction of the musical drama, in both cases incurring the wrath of conservative critics. Both Lohengrin and Genoveva were condemned for containing too few beautiful tunes and too much symphonic ballast.
But there are also differences between the two works, which help to explain why only one of their two composers acquired the status of a hero in the field of opera. In his search for a suitable libretto, Schumann saw himself as a reader burrowing his way through all manner of literary texts and finally settling on one of them. However much it may have appealed to him, it was still the work of another. If Schumann had been an opera composer of the stamp of Mozart or Strauss and kept his distance, this would not have mattered. But he was the sort of composer who needed to identify with his libretto just as surely as he had done with the poems that he had set as a lieder composer, and this was bound to cause him problems: he had to serve the different characters whether he liked them or not.
Even Beethoven had had difficulties with this problem in Fidelio. Ultimately, the only characters who mattered to him were the heroic couple of Florestan and Leonore. The rest of the characters—above all, the jailer Rocco, who is really a figure out of a singspiel—remain musically colorless. For his part, Schumann had difficulty breathing life into Genoveva, Siegfried, Golo, and Margaretha. It was easiest for him to identify with Genoveva herself, but the fact that he felt nothing for any of her three antagonists left its mark on the title role, too. In the final analysis, Genoveva is lacking in any distinctive dramatic profile.
But this was not Wagner’s way. He, too, began with a detailed study of literary texts, but he then moved away from them in order to create his own Lohengrin myth with striking scenes of archetypal power and characters whom—musically and dramatically—he was able to imagine from the outset as his own. And since he wanted not only to retrace the outlines of a legend but also to convey a message all of his own, he was more successful than Schumann in bringing out semantically clear strands in the action: on the one hand we have the positive pairing of Lohengrin and Elsa, on the other the two conspirators, Telramund and Ortrud. It is for this reason that the musical leitmotifs that can be identified in both operas are more striking and compelling in Wagner’s case than in Schumann’s.
When Liszt wrote enthusiastically that “a single chord brings us closer together than any number of phrases,”11 he was referring not to Schumann but to Wagner and to the bewitching chord that is heard just before Lohengrin’s words “Das süße Lied verhallt” (The sweet song has died away). However enthusiastic Nikolaus Harnoncourt may be about the “song of sorrow” at the start of the Genoveva overture, it was not this overture that changed the course of musical history but the beguiling sonorities of the prelude to the first act of Lohengrin.
In his libretto for an “opera for piano,” titled Schumann, Schubert und der Schnee (Schumann, Schubert, and snow), the opera director Hans Neuenfels has Schubert say to Schumann in “an aggressive, almost contemptuous tone”:
That’s why our operas were bound to fail, Schumann. To write operas, you have to love people openly or hate them just as openly, you have to stand up to society while spoiling for a fight, you have to seek out conflict and want to stretch your powerful ego to breaking point, so that it is broken down into many different pieces, you have to risk making designs on the world when your only safeguard is your own enthusiasm for yourself.
To which Schumann replies: “No, Schubert, we’re not like that.”12
Is there any point to such comparisons? Of course, we have the right to rehabilitate Genoveva, but there is no obligation on us to do so. All of us who demand that musical theater should involve drama are not insisting on superficialities but want music that is propelled by the action to achieve things of which it would otherwise be incapable. The fact that Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito (The clemency of Titus) is unlikely to achieve the popularity of Le nozze di Figaro has nothing to do with any falling off in the level of composition but with the inferior quality of the plot. In the case of the later opera seria, music and action remain at a respectful distance from one another, whereas in that of the opera buffa the plot makes the music its accomplice, inspiring it to play ever more insane tricks on us.
None of this should prevent self-declared lovers of Schumann’s music from preferring Genoveva to Lohengrin. In this, they could claim the support of Mozart’s biographer Otto Jahn, who in 1854 wrote of Lohengrin: “Instead of artistic form and structure being used to produce true characterization, we find only raw materialism of the most superficial kind.”13
Fortunately, no important composer has yet succeeded in writing in ways demanded of him by his critics—if he had done, what would be left of his music?
The only photographic double portrait of Robert and Clara Schumann was taken in Johann Anton Völlner’s Hamburg studio in March 1850. A steel engraving based on the daguerreotype was already widely available in Schumann’s day. Daguerreotypes represent their subjects the wrong way around, and so this image has been reversed in order to ensure that the couple appear as they did in real life. (Photograph: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY.)
CHAPTER 10
Director of Music in Düsseldorf (1850–54)
Schumann’s new post as municipal director of music in Düsseldorf was worth seven hundred and fifty thalers a year. By midcentury, the city had some forty-five thousand inhabitants, many of whom were proud of its large Prussian garrison, while the rest preferred its Academy of Arts. Schumann’s preference naturally lay with the latter and he soon became a member of the Paint-Box Society of Artists that was formed in 1848 and made up of members of the academy and freelance artists. The society had originally seen its aim as encouraging the republican aspirations of the bourgeois revolution of 1848–49, but after the failure of that movement it struck out in a new direction and from then on it regarded itself as artistically progressive in its rejection of both outdated romanticism and bloodless neoclassicism, while pinning its colors to the mast of the new “re
alism” in art. There was a factional thrust to this last-named movement inasmuch as it attacked social inequality in the spirit of the French artist Gustave Courbet, but it was also apolitical, seeking to depict humankind and nature without false pathos and in so doing to examine things that had previously been viewed as unworthy of artistic attention.
In the course of his years in Düsseldorf Schumann assimilated many of the ideas promoted by the city’s school of painting, but for the present he was confronted by the sort of everyday musical concerns that he had largely been spared in Dresden. He had to conduct the choral society once a week and give ten concerts a year with the municipal orchestra, together with four major musical events in the city’s two main churches, St. Lambert’s and St. Maximilian’s. The choir was made up of around 120 amateurs, although this number would often be increased for special occasions, while the string section of the orchestra comprised a mixture of around 30 professional and amateur musicians. The wind players were mostly from the local garrison, with only a handful of amateurs—the second oboist, for example, was Wilhelm Wortmann, a member of the city council who went on to become the local mayor.
Such conditions were typical of the period—only in Leipzig were they any better. It was the task of the city’s music director to forge his motley troops into a coherent army and turn the situation to as good an advantage as possible. Schumann was fortunate to find in Düsseldorf a musical landscape well cultivated by three of his predecessors: Mendelssohn, Julius Rietz, and Ferdinand Hiller.
It was Hiller who, on moving to Cologne, had commended Schumann to the General Music Society that determined Düsseldorf’s musical fate. Schumann hesitated to accept the post, as he did not want to abandon prematurely the vague hope that he might succeed Wagner at the Dresden Court Opera. But he finally reached the point when Dresden struck him as just one more city whose dust he would be happy to shake off from his feet. And Düsseldorf had much to offer; he had just turned forty, and for the first time in his career was now a city’s director of music. It was also the first time that he had had a regular salary, meaning greater financial security for Clara, who on December 1, 1851, was to bring another daughter into the world, Eugenie.
The Schumanns’ move to Dresden passed uneventfully, unmarked by any public or private celebrations, but when the family arrived at the main station in Düsseldorf at seven o’clock on the evening of September 2, 1850, on the new train from Cologne to Minden, they were greeted by an impressive welcoming committee. The local glee club then serenaded Schumann at the elegant Hotel Breidenbach. Five days later, an official concert was held in the city’s Geisler Hall to welcome Schumann to the city. If the surviving parts can be trusted, some 370 singers were involved. To Schumann’s surprise, the program included the Genoveva overture and the second part of Paradise and the Peri. According to Clara’s diary, the ensuing reception was notable for its numerous long speeches and shortage of food.
By the following day the couple was brought back to the grim reality of the cares and concerns that beset them, including acute financial worries. Their move to Düsseldorf had proved expensive, and their hotel bill was so exorbitant that they moved as quickly as possible to rooms with a Fräulein Schön on the corner of Alleestraße and Grabenstraße, although this turned out to be a bad move, and Schumann was reduced to “a highly nervous, agitated, and excitable state” by the “constant noise on the main road—barrel organs, screaming children, carriages, and so on.” Clara herself was “unable to play on account of all our domestic chores, also I really can’t allow myself to be seen among the lower orders here, almost all of whom are coarse, insolent, and pretentious.” In short, “I feel like weeping all day!”2
Fortunately the society ladies with whom Clara came into contact proved friendly and willing to help, even if their informal and cheerful manner sometimes seemed “to exceed the bounds of femininity and decency.” “Married life is supposed to be more frenchified and more frivolous here,” she confided in her diary.3 Instead she clung to the doctor, poet, and writer of music Wolfgang Müller von Königswinter and his wife, who by all accounts were a laudable exception to the rule. The couple maintained even closer contacts with Richard Hasenclever, a physician and aesthete, and the artist Theodor Hildebrandt, who was Eugenie’s godfather. This little group of artists also included Carl Sohn, Christian Köhler, and Carl Friedrich Lessing. Other acquaintances were Wilhelm von Schadow, the director of the Düsseldorf Academy of Art and a former friend of Mendelssohn, and Joseph Euler, a local notary with an interest in music. On September 15, the young violinist and later Schumann biographer Wilhelm Joseph von Wasielewski arrived in Leipzig as concertmaster of the orchestra. It was not long before he also assumed the function of Schumann’s right-hand man.
Schumann’s first appearance as a conductor at the subscription concert on October 24, 1850, was an outright success, not least as a result of Clara’s contribution in the form of a brilliant rendition of Mendelssohn’s Piano Concerto in G Minor. This was also the first time for many years that she had played from memory. But when she was given a little basket of flowers instead of a fee, she wrote indignantly to Hiller: “It is completely inconceivable that these gentleman should think I’ll play at their concerts for nothing, nor can I understand their lack of delicacy in even demanding such a thing! Do they think we’re well off?”4
The fact that the ten subscription concerts that took place in the course of this first season were essentially a success was due not least to Schumann’s ambitious programming: among the works he conducted were Handel’s Israel in Egypt and Bach’s St. John Passion, numerous orchestral pieces by Beethoven and, of course, music by Schumann himself, including his Rhenish Symphony, which was repeated very soon after its acclaimed first performance on February 6, 1851. On the other hand, the Cello Concerto in A Minor op. 129 that Schumann wrote in October 1850 remained unperformed, at least for the time being, as the cellist Robert Emil Bockmühl for whom it was intended raised a number of persistent and petty objections to the solo part.
The eighth concert of the opening season was devoted almost exclusively to works by Schumann. In spite of the participation of Clara and the popular contralto Sophie Schloß, it was coolly received by its audience—an early sign of the difficulties from which the Schumanns were soon to suffer. Schumann felt persecuted, and for the most part Clara shared that view. As always, there are two sides to the coin. On the one hand, we need to remind ourselves that Schumann had little experience as a conductor and above all he had been dealt a poor hand. If he was prevented from rehearsing a work—as often happened with guest appearances—he would fight back, but if he had to ensure disciplined rehearsals and motivate a possibly unenthusiastic ensemble, he tended to run away rather than try to inspire his forces. When conducting his own compositions, he occasionally seems to have listened to them with his inner ear rather than following what was actually taking place in the concert hall.
Shortly after Schumann took up his new post, the singer Friederike Altgelt reported:
He is a real character, eccentric but good-natured, silent, often one doesn’t know whether to laugh at him or become angry. She is an angel, delightful, kind, childishly cheerful. [. . .] He is an exacting director with a keen ear, but he wields his baton in a rather irregular way. She directs everything—wherever you look, it’s her. She sets the tone, helps you when you get stuck, and always plays the piano for the choral society.5
Schumann soon became resigned when things did not go the way he wanted and was either unwilling or unable to intervene decisively and impartially in the many arguments that any leader of a large and motley ensemble almost always has to face. And so we find the pianist and composer Louise Japha complaining after the second concert of the 1851–52 winter season:
It’s a pity that a large part of the local public is against Sch[umann] and listens to all his works in a prejudicial frame of mind; it is easy to grow impatient when you see how many people—otherwise highly cultured—h
ave absolutely no idea about Sch[umann] and wish that their former music director, Hiller, would come back because “he conducts much better and is much kinder, a man truly at home in the salon.”6
During his second season in Düsseldorf, Schumann nonetheless introduced local audiences to Handel’s Jephtha and Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, Schubert’s C Major Symphony (Great), Gade’s B-flat Major Symphony, Mendelssohn’s A Major Symphony, and Chopin’s Piano Concerto in F Minor. He himself contributed to the proceedings with performances of his own oratorio Der Rose Pilgerfahrt (The pilgrimage of the rose) op. 112 and choral ballad Der Königssohn (The king’s son) op. 116. Reporting on the success of the last work, Clara informed her friend in Dresden, Marie von Lindemann, in May 1852:
The audience was very enthusiastic, at least to the extent that they are able to be so here, for it is difficult to find a colder audience in the whole of Germany; they have absolutely no idea how lucky they are to have my husband, just as they had no idea with their previous conductors, Mendelssohn, Rietz, and Hiller. As soon as an opportunity presents itself, we’ll be leaving Düsseldorf.7
At the end of 1852, three members of the board of directors of the General Music Society openly demanded that Schumann curtail his activities as a conductor or even end them completely. The resultant conflict was resolved when numerous members of the society came out in support of Schumann, but the corrosive effect of the dispute continued to make itself felt throughout the 1852–53 season, even though there were again important first performances to celebrate: this time the works included such impressive pieces as the great choral ballad Des Sängers Fluch (The minstrel’s curse) op. 139, a cycle of four shorter ballads titled Vom Pagen und der Königstochter (The princess and the page) op. 140, two movements of the Mass op. 147 and the revised version of the Symphony in D Minor op. 120.