by Martin Geck
The situation finally came to a head at the start of the 1853–54 season with a disastrous performance of Moritz Hauptmann’s Mass in G Minor in St. Maximilian’s Church. Schumann’s assistant, Julius Tausch, had rehearsed the work and conducted the final rehearsal. In spite of this, Schumann—evidently energized by the presence in the city of Brahms, Joseph Joachim, and Bettina von Arnim—insisted on conducting the public performance, which was given as part of the official celebrations marking the Feast of St. Maximilian. The performance turned into a fiasco, after which the choir refused to sing Mendelssohn’s First Walpurgis Night under Schumann’s direction at the first subscription concert of the new season. As a result, Tausch conducted the work on October 27, 1853, although at the same concert Schumann himself took the baton for the first performance of his Violin Fantasy op. 131, with Joachim as the soloist. And yet, not even this was what Schumann had in fact wanted, for the fantasy was a late replacement for his new violin concerto, which the directors of the General Music Society had banned outright.
The situation was hopeless. The directors of the society suggested that in future Schumann might conduct only his own works and leave everything else to Tausch, but Schumann indignantly turned down their proposal. The resultant “letters of ultimatum”8 that Schumann wrote amounted to a resignation that no one on the committee showed any inclination to decline. Even so, it was not until October 1, 1854, that the contract was finally canceled. Until then, Schumann continued to be paid.
The Schumanns again discussed the idea of moving to Vienna or Berlin, reviving plans that they had already mooted and abandoned. For the present they turned their backs on the now-hated city of Düsseldorf only for a short period in the weeks leading up to Christmas 1853. A four-week conducting tour of the Netherlands was intended as a distraction, with Johann Verhulst—now court music director in The Hague—ensuring that it was a success: “Schumann found the concerts well prepared and needed only to stand on the podium in order to conduct,” the critic of the Signale für die musikalische Welt informed his readers in the context of the concerts in Utrecht, The Hague, Rotterdam, and Amsterdam, concerts that on the whole passed off very well.
In Rotterdam, Schumann conducted his Rhenish Symphony and Clara played his piano concerto. After the concert, a large crowd gathered outside his hotel and in spite of the extreme cold, a wind band and a hundred torch-bearing singers performed the Forest Chorus from Der Rose Pilgerfahrt and a “birthday march”—presumably an arrangement of Schumann’s op. 85, no. 1. Verhulst conducted both works. Clara also performed at court, where Prince Friedrich of the Netherlands turned to her husband and asked what was presumably the obligatory question: “Are you musical, too?”10 But in general, Schumann was honored not only as a composer but also as a conductor, and it was with some satisfaction, therefore, that he was able to take his leave of the “pig-headed monster,”11 which is how he had once described the institution of the orchestra. As it turned out, it was to be his definitive farewell.
But Schumann was not only a music director, he was also a composer, and we must now turn our attention to that aspect of his life in Düsseldorf. I have already mentioned the success of his Rhenish Symphony, about which I shall have more to say in Intermezzo VIII. There followed the oratorio Der Rose Pilgerfahrt op. 112, which had its unofficial first performance in the Schumanns’ new home on the Kastanienallee, into which they moved in July 1851. (The street was renamed the Königsallee in 1854.) Here there was a salon that could seat up to sixty people and was admirably suited to a performance of the work’s more intimate version with piano accompaniment.
According to the reminiscences of the tenor Ernst Koch, Clara’s playing was “wonderfully poetic,” while Schumann sat beside her, conducting from the autograph score, “blissfully dreaming.”12 Here, surrounded by a small group of selected professional and amateur singers, including the aforementioned contralto Sophie Schloß as the Elfin Queen, he felt more at his ease than in front of a sometimes alarmingly large ensemble in the Geisler Hall. He could also reckon on greater interest and attention.
Schumann used the second half of 1851 to work on various pieces, including the two Violin Sonatas opp. 105 and 121, the Piano Trio op. 110 and the second version of his Symphony in D Minor. Nor should we forget his overture to Goethe’s Hermann und Dorothea op. 136 or his choral ballad Der Königssohn. We have already had occasion to refer to some of the works from 1852: the choral ballads Des Sängers Fluch and Vom Pagen und der Königstochter, the Mass op. 147 and the Requiem op. 148. The mass, which Schumann felt was “just as well suited to church as to the concert hall,”13 is an example of church music that is both elaborately artistic and practicable but even today it remains unjustly ignored. In addition to its rapt melodic writing, it also uses contrapuntal procedures that are never an end in themselves but used for expressive purposes. He later added an offertory, “Tota pulchra es, Maria” (You are all beautiful, Mary), that represents the Protestant composer’s contribution to the cult of the Virgin Mary. It is hard to conceive of a more heartfelt piece. As such, it is another example of Schumann’s desire to be understood and appreciated by the citizens of Düsseldorf.
Among the works that Schumann wrote in 1853 are his Drei Klaviersonaten für die Jugend (Three piano sonatas for young people) op. 118, the overture to the Scenes from Goethe’s Faust, the Introduction and Allegro for piano and orchestra op. 134, the Violin Fantasy op. 131, the Violin Concerto in D Minor, the Gesänge der Frühe (Songs of dawn) op. 133, and the Third Violin Sonata in A Minor (which, as we shall see toward the end of this chapter, represents a reworking of the F–A–E Sonata).
As a prophet in his own country, Schumann may not have been held in very high esteem at this time, but his fame continued to grow away from home. It was no accident that he was an honorary member of various societies and institutions, including the Salzburg Mozarteum, the Vienna Academy of Music, the Viennese Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde (Society of Friends of Music), the London Musical Institute, and the Dutch Society for the Promotion of Music. Although publishers may not have been beating down his door, they were still occasionally interested in his works. A typical day in Düsseldorf might well find Schumann fully occupied negotiating with publishers, preparing new works for the printer, arranging piano reductions of large-scale orchestral pieces, or superintending new editions of older compositions. In 1852, he was additionally occupied with a major literary project in the form of a new edition of the articles that he had written for the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. It appeared in 1854 under the title Gesammelte Schriften über Musik und Musiker (Collected writings on music and musicians). Its four volumes are a miracle of originality in their ability to explore the subject of music criticism from a multiplicity of perspectives. And yet Schumann did not merely want to set up a literary memorial to himself, he also planned to collect together what others had said about music in the guise of a “garden of musical poets.” The project was largely completed, though it had to wait until relatively recently to see the light of day. From Endenich, Schumann wrote to Bettina von Arnim to explain the project:
In 1853 I thought that under the title “Poets’ Garden for Music” I would round off all that can be read in the first poets about music and how it affects them—affects them wondrously like a heavenly language. The finest and most glorious contributions are those of Martin Luther, Shakespeare, Jean Paul, and Rückert.14
To this end Schumann paid repeated visits to the Royal Library in Düsseldorf and read Greek and Latin authors, Goethe, Schiller, Heinse, and the Bible in his quest for suitable quotations. We should not see his activities as a collector as a substitute for any flagging interest in composition. Rather, his search was the fulfillment of a long-held and deeply felt wish to authenticate the art of music by means of philosophy and poetry. For him, the ideas found here reflected the range of emotional states that music is capable of expressing. This was a long-standing theme of his: by dint of its union with poetry and thinking, music wo
uld gain in effectiveness and meaning.
Although Schumann never abandoned his former habit of immersing himself in the world of his own imagination, he remained receptive to outward stimuli. In the summer of 1851, for example, the Schumanns traveled to southern Germany and Switzerland, a journey described by Clara as “the most beautiful that Robert has undertaken with me. [. . .] Even in Bonn, where we boarded the boat and where there were crowds of boisterous students, the sky looked so clear, the Rhine so green, and, throughout it all, such cheerful music that Robert, too, cheered up and remained so.”15 They also visited Heidelberg, where Schumann was reminded of his student days, after which they traveled on to Basel and Geneva and thence to Chamonix. From their room in the Hôtel Royal they could see Mont Blanc “just as if the good Lord had placed it there for us.”16
Schumann was then asked to judge a competition for male-voice choirs in Antwerp, an invitation that Clara described as a “curious postlude.” He complained about having to work a twelve-hour day and vilified the French choirs, “all of which sang only the worst possible stuff.” But a few free days following the competition allowed him to admire Antwerp’s art treasures, “especially Rubens,” and, in Brussels, to see the “funny little Mannikin.” He also bought some lace as a gift for Clara.17
Back in Düsseldorf, the Schumanns received some unexpected visitors on September 1, 1851, as Clara noted in her diary:
5 in the afternoon, Liszt arrived with the Princess Wittgenstein (whom he intends as his future wife), together with her fourteen-year-old daughter [Marie] and governess. We were surprised to find the princess a somewhat matronly woman who can fascinate Liszt only by her kindness and wit and refined culture, which she possesses in the truest sense of the term.
A children’s party planned for Marie’s birthday had to be called off, and instead they played an arrangement of Schumann’s Symphony in C Major for piano eight hands that existed in manuscript form, and at the end Liszt dazzled his listeners with a new concert work: “As always, he played with truly demonic bravura, his command of his instrument is positively devilish (there’s no other word for it), but, ah! the works themselves are such wretched stuff!” Although Liszt felt apparent consternation at his listeners’ silence, Clara felt that it was better to say nothing “when one is so deeply offended.”18 Fortunately, Liszt bore no grudges and was happy to perform Schumann’s Manfred op. 115 in Weimar on June 13, 1852.
In April 1852, the Schumanns moved to the Herzogstraße for six months, not finding a permanent place to stay in the town until September 1852, when they rented property at 1032 (now 15) Bilker Straße. Shortly before that, Clara suffered a miscarriage and as a result was “in considerable pain,” as Schumann noted in his diary.19 Since the early summer, he himself had been suffering from insomnia, depression, and a speech impediment. By November his hearing was “strangely affected.”20 And on December 27, 1852, he summed up his condition with the words: “For almost half the year I’ve been laid low with a profound nervous disorder.”21
In spite of this, he did all he could to get through each day. “His home life,” reports Wasielewski, who was an important eyewitness of the composer’s final years,
was regular to the point of monotony. He would work every morning until noon. He would then go for a walk, usually in the company of his wife or one or other of his closer acquaintances. At 1 o’clock he dined, then, after a brief rest, he would work till 5 or 6. At that point he often visited some public place or the private society of which he was a member in order to read the papers and drink a glass of beer or wine. He normally returned home at 8 for his evening meal.22
Although Schumann also attended some of the celebrations organized by local artists, he felt more comfortable in the company of friends and acquaintances, enjoying a cigar—he called them “little devils”—or drinking a glass of beer or champagne. He continued to take a lively interest in outstanding natural phenomena. On April 27, 1852, for example, he read in the paper that the respected director of the Düsseldorf Observatory, Robert Luther, had discovered the asteroid Thetis. By the following evening he had turned up at the observatory in person in order to see the phenomenon for himself.
Otherwise Schumann took regular walks through the Hofgarten and, further afield, to some of the local forests and the grounds of Benrath Castle. His eldest daughter, Marie, later told her younger sister Eugenie about family life in Düsseldorf:
Before we left for school, we used to say “Good morning” to our father—our parents breakfasted alone. We did not see him again until lunchtime, when he sometimes chatted with us but often remained silent or spoke to our mother. [. . .] After lunch we returned to school and saw our father again only in the evening when he stopped working—by then it was already growing dark. But it was wonderful when this happened for he then devoted himself to us entirely. When we were small, he would let us ride on his knees, reciting a little poem, or he played a game with us that he called “Bread in the baker’s oven” and which involved his taking one of us by the hands and sliding us between his legs.23
The children were sometimes included whenever their father pursued one of his new spiritualist interests, about which Clara reports candidly and with a certain indulgence. “When he starts his table-rapping, he is completely relaxed and agreeably excited,” she described a meeting in the Schumanns’ home during the Thirty-First Lower Rhineland Music Festival in May 1853. Shortly beforehand Schumann himself had written to Hiller in Paris:
We tried out table-rapping for the first time yesterday. A wonderful power! Just imagine: I ask the table to tell me the rhythm of the first two bars of the C Minor Symphony! It hesitated longer than usual before answering—but finally it started: —only a little on the slow side. When I said: “But the tempo is faster, my dear table!” it made haste to beat the right time.25
We do not need to interpret such actions as harbingers of Schumann’s mental breakdown but may regard them, rather, as a meaningful attempt at self-help—perhaps he was trying to find a harmless escape value for all the worries with which he was obsessed. It was harmless to the extent that table-rapping was then regarded as a piquant social pastime with no obloquy attached to it. In this context it is worth recalling an entry in Cosima Wagner’s diary for April 1, 1872, describing a visit by Nietzsche: “Yesterday we tried without success to make a table move; we had spoken about it at lunchtime. R[ichard] explains it as a matter of will power, I as fraud.”26
Schumann’s pleasure in being able to add a touch of art to his everyday existence emerges from a short piece for vocal quartet and piano to which Clara gave the title: “On 13 September 1853, composed by Robert for Klara [sic] on the gift of a grand piano.” It opens with the lines “Die Orange und Myrthe hier,/Und rings der Blumen Zier” (The orange and the myrtle here/And all around the flowers dear). Clara naturally recalled the time thirteen years earlier when her husband had given her her first piano as a bridal gift and added the lines about orange and myrtle. In 1853, to mark her birthday, he secretly bought a new instrument from the Düsseldorf piano maker Johann Bernhard Klems and also lined up four singers who surprised Clara with a setting of the familiar words as she entered the apartment. “It may sound arrogant when I say it, but isn’t it true that I’m the happiest woman alive?” she asked her diary after they had tried out Schumann’s latest works on the new piano.27
Clara was thirty-four when she wrote these lines. Meanwhile, the twenty-year-old Johannes Brahms was on a walking tour of the Rhine valley, starting out from Mainz. He had previously given recitals in several towns and cities in northern Germany. In Hanover he was introduced to Joseph Joachim, Schumann’s twenty-two-year-old protégé, and in Weimar he met Liszt. In Bonn, finally, he encountered Schumann’s former concertmaster Wasielewski, so that there were now no fewer than three musicians to draw his attention to Schumann. Of these three, Wasielewski was particularly insistent that he should call on Schumann in Düsseldorf.
Like Schumann, Brahms was a great
admirer of the writings of E. T. A. Hoffmann—so much so, indeed, that in the autograph score of his Piano Sonata op. 1, he attributed the piece to “Johann Kreisler junior,” alluding to the fictional character whom Schumann had already honored in his Kreisleriana. Of Schumann’s compositions, he knew only Carnaval but did not think very highly of it, no doubt because he found it too illustrative in character. In order for Brahms to demonstrate greater appreciation of Schumann’s music, he first needed to spend some time on the Mehlem estates of the Cologne financier Wilhelm Ludwig Deichmann, a visit organized by Wasielewski. Here there were scores aplenty; here local and foreign artists would often meet to make music in sociable surroundings; and it was here, finally, that Brahms decided to call on Schumann in Düsseldorf, announcing his visit for September 30.
The composer and conductor Franz Wüllner later recalled that in 1853 there was almost universal enthusiasm for the “slim youth with long blond hair and a veritable head of John the Baptist, from whose eyes flashed energy and wit.”28 But this was only the start, for when Brahms arrived in Düsseldorf, Schumann acquired an heir in spirit, and Clara a friend for life. Brahms remained in Düsseldorf for over a month. Writing when the visit was already over, Clara recalled:
this month introduced us to a quite wonderful person in the twenty-year-old composer Brahms from Hamburg. Here is another of those people who seems positively God-sent! He played us sonatas, scherzos, etc. of his own composition, all of them showing exuberant imagination, depth of feeling, and mastery of form. Robert says that there was nothing that he could tell him to take away or to add. [. . .] He has a great future before him, for he will first find the true field for his genius when he begins to write for the orchestra! Robert says that one can only hope that heaven may keep him fit and well!29