Composer That Went Crazy
Karri Weston
Schumann and his family moved to Dsseldorf in 1850 in the hope that his appointment as the city's director of music would provide financial security, but his shyness and mental instability made it difficult for him to work with his orchestra and he had to resign after three years. In 1853 the Schumanns met the twenty-year-old Johannes Brahms, whom Schumann praised in an article in the Neue Zeitschrift fr Musik. The following year Schumann's always-precarious mental health deteriorated gravely. He threw himself into the River Rhine but was rescued and taken to a private sanatorium near Bonn, where he lived for more than two years, dying there at the age of 46.
Robert Schumann[n 1] was born in Zwickau, in the Kingdom of Saxony (today the German state of Saxony), into an affluent middle-class family.[4] On 13 June 1810 the local newspaper, the Zwickauer Wochenblatt (Zwickau Weekly Paper), carried the announcement, "On 8 June to Herr August Schumann, notable citizen and bookseller here, a little son".[5] He was the fifth and last child of August Schumann and his wife, Johanna Christiane (ne Schnabel). August, not only a bookseller but also a lexicographer, author and publisher of chivalric romances, made considerable sums from his German translations of writers such as Cervantes, Walter Scott and Lord Byron.[2] Robert, his favourite child, was able to spend many hours exploring the classics of literature in his father's collection.[2] Intermittently, between the ages of three and five-and-a-half, he was placed with foster parents, as his mother had contracted typhus.[4]
At the age of six Schumann went to a private preparatory school, where he remained for four years.[6] When he was seven he began studying general music and piano with the local organist, Johann Gottfried Kuntsch [ca], and for a time he also had cello and flute lessons with one of the municipal musicians, Carl Gottlieb Meissner.[7] Throughout his childhood and youth his love of music and literature ran in tandem, with poems and dramatic works produced alongside small-scale compositions, mainly piano pieces and songs.[8] He was not a musical child prodigy like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart or Felix Mendelssohn,[4] but his talent as a pianist was evident from an early age: in 1850 the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (Universal Musical Journal) printed a biographical sketch of Schumann which included an account from contemporary sources that even as a boy he possessed a special talent for portraying feelings and characteristic traits in melody:
From 1820 Schumann attended the Zwickau Lyceum, the local high school of about two hundred boys, where he remained till the age of eighteen, studying a traditional curriculum. In addition to his studies he read extensively: among his early enthusiasms were Schiller and Jean Paul.[10] According to the musical historian George Hall, Paul remained Schumann's favourite author and exercised a powerful influence on the composer's creativity with his sensibility and vein of fantasy.[8] Musically, Schumann got to know the works of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and of living composers Carl Maria von Weber, with whom August Schumann tried unsuccessfully to arrange for Robert to study.[8] August was not particularly musical but he encouraged his son's interest in music, buying him a Streicher grand piano and organising trips to Leipzig for a performance of Die Zauberflte (The Magic Flute) and Carlsbad to hear the celebrated pianist Ignaz Moscheles.[11]
August Schumann died in 1826; his widow was less enthusiastic about a musical career for her son and persuaded him to study for the law as a profession. After his final examinations at the Lyceum in March 1828 he entered Leipzig University. Accounts differ about his diligence as a law student. According to his roommate Emil Flechsig [de], he never set foot in a lecture hall,[13] but he himself recorded, "I am industrious and regular, and enjoy my jurisprudence ... and am only now beginning to appreciate its true worth".[14] Nonetheless reading and playing the piano occupied a good deal of his time, and he developed expensive tastes for champagne and cigars.[8] Musically, he discovered the works of Franz Schubert, whose death in November 1828 caused Schumann to cry all night.[8] The leading piano teacher in Leipzig was Friedrich Wieck, who recognised Schumann's talent and accepted him as a pupil.[15]
After a year in Leipzig Schumann convinced his mother that he should move to the University of Heidelberg which, unlike Leipzig, offered courses in Roman, ecclesiastical and international law (as well as reuniting Schumann with his close friend Eduard Rller who was a student there).[16] After matriculating at the university on 30 July 1829 he travelled in Switzerland and Italy from late August to late October. He was greatly taken with Rossini's operas and the bel canto of the soprano Giuditta Pasta; he wrote to Wieck, "one can have no notion of Italian music without hearing it under Italian skies".[13] Another influence on him was hearing the violin virtuoso Niccol Paganini play in Frankfurt in April 1830.[17] In the words of one biographer, "The easy-going discipline at Heidelberg University helped the world to lose a bad lawyer and to gain a great musician".[18] Finally deciding in favour of music rather than the law as a career, he wrote to his mother on 30 July 1830 telling her how he saw his future: "My entire life has been a twenty-year struggle between poetry and prose, or call it music and law".[19] He persuaded her to ask Wieck for an objective assessment of his musical potential. Wieck's verdict was that with the necessary hard work Schumann could become a leading pianist within three years. A six-month trial period was agreed.[20]
During successive months in 1835 Schumann met three musicians whom he regarded with particular respect: Felix Mendelssohn, Chopin and Moscheles.[35] Of these, he was most influenced in his compositions by Mendelssohn, although the latter's restrained classicism is reflected in Schumann's later works rather than in those of the 1830s.[36] Early in 1835 he completed two substantial compositions: Carnaval, Op. 9 and the Symphonic Studies, Op.13. These works grew out of his romantic relationship with Ernestine von Fricken [de], a fellow pupil of Wieck. The musical themes of Carnaval derive from the name of her home town, Asch.[37][n 4] The Symphonic Studies are based on a melody said to be by Ernestine's father, Baron von Fricken, an amateur flautist.[38] Schumann and Ernestine became secretly engaged, but in the view of the musical scholar Joan Chissell, during 1835 Schumann gradually found that Ernestine's personality was not as interesting to him as he first thought, and this, together with his discovery that she was an illegitimate, impecunious, adopted daughter of Fricken, brought the affair to a gradual end.[39] According to the biographer Alan Walker, Ernestine may have been less than frank with Schumann about her background and he was hurt when he learnt the truth.[40]
Schumann felt a growing attraction to Wieck's daughter, the sixteen-year-old Clara. She was her father's star pupil, a piano virtuoso emotionally mature beyond her years, with a developing reputation.[41] According to Chissell, her concerto debut at the Leipzig Gewandhaus on 9 November 1835, with Mendelssohn conducting, "set the seal on all her earlier successes, and there was now no doubting that a great future lay before her as a pianist".[41] Schumann had watched her career approvingly since she was nine, but only now fell in love with her. His feelings were reciprocated: they declared their love to each other in January 1836.[42] Schumann expected that Wieck would welcome the proposed marriage, but he was mistaken: Wieck refused his consent, fearing that Schumann would be unable to provide for his daughter, that she would have to abandon her career, and that she would be legally required to relinquish her inheritance to her husband.[43] It took a series of acrimonious legal actions over the next four years for Schumann to obtain a court ruling that he and Clara were free to marry without her father's consent.[44]
Schumann and Clara finally married on 12 September 1840, the day before her twenty-first birthday.[50] Hall writes that marriage gave Schumann "the emotional and domestic stability on which his subsequent achievements were founded".[34] Clara made some sacrifices in marrying Schumann: as a pianist of international reputation she was the better-known of the two but her career was continually interrupted by motherhood of their seven children. She inspired Schumann in his composing career, encouraging him to extend his range as a composer beyond solo piano works.[34] During 1840 Schumann turned his attention to song, producing more than half his total output of Lieder, including the cycles Myrthen ("Myrtles", a wedding present for Clara), Frauenliebe und Leben ("Woman's Love and Life"), Dichterliebe ("Poet's Love"), and settings of words by Joseph von Eichendorff, Heinrich Heine and others.[34]
In 1841 Schumann focused on orchestral music. On 31 March his First Symphony, The Spring, was premiered by Mendelssohn at a concert in the Gewandhaus at which Clara played Chopin's Second Piano Concerto and some of Schumann's works for solo piano.[51] His next orchestral works were the Overture, Scherzo and Finale, the Phantasie for piano and orchestra (which later became the first movement of the Piano Concerto) and a new symphony (eventually published as the Fourth, in D minor). Clara gave birth to a daughter in September, the first of the Schumanns' seven children to survive.[34]
The following year Schumann turned his attention to chamber music. He studied works by Haydn and Mozart, despite an ambivalent attitude to the former, writing: "Today it is impossible to learn anything new from him. He is like a familiar friend of the house whom all greet with pleasure and with esteem, but who has ceased to arouse any particular interest".[52] He was stronger in his praise of Mozart: "Serenity, repose, grace, the characteristics of the antique works of art, are also those of Mozart's school. The Greeks gave to 'The Thunderer'[n 6] a radiant expression, and radiantly does Mozart launch his lightnings".[54] After his studies Schumann produced three string quartets, a Piano Quintet (premiered in 1843) and a Piano Quartet (premiered in 1844).[34]
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