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TLS 5677: Judith Chernaik: The role player
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Frank Forman
Jan 27, 2012, 9:52:43 PM1/27/12
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TLS 5677: Judith Chernaik: The role player
Published: 20 January 2012
Judith Chernaik is the co-editor of Poems on the Underground, now in its
tenth edition.
Michael Musgrave
THE LIFE OF SCHUMANN
210pp. Cambridge University Press. £50. 978 0 521 80248 2
More than 150 years after his death in Endenich asylum, Robert Schumann's
life and works still arouse partisan debate. Were his hallucinations and
attempted suicide the climax of lifelong bipolar illness or the final
stage of syphilis? Do the works of his last years (notably the Violin
Concerto which Joseph Joachim refused to perform or publish) reflect his
mental decline, or suggest a master forging new artistic paths? Are the
late songs - the Maria Stuart cycle, the settings of the
seventeenyear-old-poet Elisabeth Kulmann - the equal of his great song
cycles of 1840? Was his wife Clara a convention-enforcing censor as well
as a tireless performer of his works? Was her own genius stifled by
Schumann's bürgerlich love of home and family? Musicians, critics and
biographers have long been unable to agree. Brahms and Clara were bitterly
estranged following a quarrel about the respective merits of the first and
final versions of the D minor Symphony and Mahler re-orchestrated all four
symphonies for performance in Vienna.
One recent biographer, the psychiatrist Peter Ostwald, offered a
retrospective analysis of a manic-depressive personality, manifesting
immature attachment to his mother, repressed homosexual longings and
repeated mental breakdowns. Ostwald's analysis is impossible to prove or
disprove, though Michael Musgrave, the author of this most recent
biography, regards it as "indispensable".
Although generally more cautious, John Worthen probably overstates the
alternative case for Schumann being "bright and selfreliant" from youth,
"the confident, proud, determined and self-determining person that ... he
remained to the end of his life". Even John Daverio, in a major account of
Schumann's life and works (1997), speculated on a unifying theme: the
composer acting out various roles in his major works, as in his earlier
doppelgänger figures Florestan and Eusebius, the fictional authors of his
early piano cycles and sonatas.
Musgrave, too, has a distinctive approach, which he announces at the end
of a promising introduction to his Life of Schumann. His aim is to present
Schumann "from the perspective of a working musician, and drawing largely
on his own words". Musgrave's Schumann turns out to be a shrewd
businessman, an efficient proprietor of the music journal he founded, a
careful accountant, a sort of glorified bookkeeper. The focus is on money,
marketing, publication, reputation, the minutiae of everyday life. No
doubt this was important at the time. But where is the heart of this
troubled figure? Schumann comes through occasionally in his own words, and
ample quotation from diaries and letters is a virtue of this book. But any
hints of the composer's tempestuous life, gifts and problems are
immediately flattened by the prose - on his extraordinary shifts from
piano music to song to orchestral composition, Musgrave writes "While the
piano was Schumann's primary means of expression, he soon hankered after
wider genres ...". Musgrave has made generous use of primary sources and
of earlier biographies, and he is usually accurate, though his account of
the 1840 "year of song" suggests inadvertently that these marriage gifts
were composed after Schumann's marriage to Clara rather than during the
anguished months before. He lists virtually all Schumann's compositions
(also itemized in tabular form), but attempts only the most general
discussion of the music. Names and dates are the product of thorough
research, but of the inner life there is little or nothing. And strangely,
for a book in a well-established Cambridge series, proofreading errors
abound: the critic Gottfried Wilhelm Fink is also "Finck", the Sphinxes of
Carnaval are "Spinxes", tubercular is "tuberlcular", and "pubic
performance" occurs three times in as many pages.
In all, it is doubtful whether the "workmanlike" Schumann is destined to
replace the high priest of Romanticism whose greatest works, from the
Davidsbündlertänze to Paradise and the Peri and the late Scenes from
Faust, are still being rediscovered and freshly interpreted to this day.
Published: 20 January 2012
Judith Chernaik is the co-editor of Poems on the Underground, now in its
tenth edition.
Michael Musgrave
THE LIFE OF SCHUMANN
210pp. Cambridge University Press. £50. 978 0 521 80248 2
More than 150 years after his death in Endenich asylum, Robert Schumann's
life and works still arouse partisan debate. Were his hallucinations and
attempted suicide the climax of lifelong bipolar illness or the final
stage of syphilis? Do the works of his last years (notably the Violin
Concerto which Joseph Joachim refused to perform or publish) reflect his
mental decline, or suggest a master forging new artistic paths? Are the
late songs - the Maria Stuart cycle, the settings of the
seventeenyear-old-poet Elisabeth Kulmann - the equal of his great song
cycles of 1840? Was his wife Clara a convention-enforcing censor as well
as a tireless performer of his works? Was her own genius stifled by
Schumann's bürgerlich love of home and family? Musicians, critics and
biographers have long been unable to agree. Brahms and Clara were bitterly
estranged following a quarrel about the respective merits of the first and
final versions of the D minor Symphony and Mahler re-orchestrated all four
symphonies for performance in Vienna.
One recent biographer, the psychiatrist Peter Ostwald, offered a
retrospective analysis of a manic-depressive personality, manifesting
immature attachment to his mother, repressed homosexual longings and
repeated mental breakdowns. Ostwald's analysis is impossible to prove or
disprove, though Michael Musgrave, the author of this most recent
biography, regards it as "indispensable".
Although generally more cautious, John Worthen probably overstates the
alternative case for Schumann being "bright and selfreliant" from youth,
"the confident, proud, determined and self-determining person that ... he
remained to the end of his life". Even John Daverio, in a major account of
Schumann's life and works (1997), speculated on a unifying theme: the
composer acting out various roles in his major works, as in his earlier
doppelgänger figures Florestan and Eusebius, the fictional authors of his
early piano cycles and sonatas.
Musgrave, too, has a distinctive approach, which he announces at the end
of a promising introduction to his Life of Schumann. His aim is to present
Schumann "from the perspective of a working musician, and drawing largely
on his own words". Musgrave's Schumann turns out to be a shrewd
businessman, an efficient proprietor of the music journal he founded, a
careful accountant, a sort of glorified bookkeeper. The focus is on money,
marketing, publication, reputation, the minutiae of everyday life. No
doubt this was important at the time. But where is the heart of this
troubled figure? Schumann comes through occasionally in his own words, and
ample quotation from diaries and letters is a virtue of this book. But any
hints of the composer's tempestuous life, gifts and problems are
immediately flattened by the prose - on his extraordinary shifts from
piano music to song to orchestral composition, Musgrave writes "While the
piano was Schumann's primary means of expression, he soon hankered after
wider genres ...". Musgrave has made generous use of primary sources and
of earlier biographies, and he is usually accurate, though his account of
the 1840 "year of song" suggests inadvertently that these marriage gifts
were composed after Schumann's marriage to Clara rather than during the
anguished months before. He lists virtually all Schumann's compositions
(also itemized in tabular form), but attempts only the most general
discussion of the music. Names and dates are the product of thorough
research, but of the inner life there is little or nothing. And strangely,
for a book in a well-established Cambridge series, proofreading errors
abound: the critic Gottfried Wilhelm Fink is also "Finck", the Sphinxes of
Carnaval are "Spinxes", tubercular is "tuberlcular", and "pubic
performance" occurs three times in as many pages.
In all, it is doubtful whether the "workmanlike" Schumann is destined to
replace the high priest of Romanticism whose greatest works, from the
Davidsbündlertänze to Paradise and the Peri and the late Scenes from
Faust, are still being rediscovered and freshly interpreted to this day.
Peter T. Daniels
Jan 27, 2012, 11:03:53 PM1/27/12
to
On Jan 27, 9:52 pm, Frank Forman <chec...@panix.com> wrote:
> TLS 5677: Judith Chernaik: The role player
> Published: 20 January 2012
>
> Judith Chernaik is the co-editor of Poems on the Underground, now in its
> tenth edition.
>
> Michael Musgrave
> THE LIFE OF SCHUMANN
> 210pp. Cambridge University Press. £50. 978 0 521 80248 2
$75 for a 210-page book that should be of general interest? (Though
> TLS 5677: Judith Chernaik: The role player
> Published: 20 January 2012
>
> Judith Chernaik is the co-editor of Poems on the Underground, now in its
> tenth edition.
>
> Michael Musgrave
> THE LIFE OF SCHUMANN
> 210pp. Cambridge University Press. £50. 978 0 521 80248 2
the reviewer suggests it isn't.)
eusebius
Jan 31, 2012, 11:49:27 PM1/31/12
to
'workmanlike' and leaden Joan Chissell, to Jensen, to it seems this
Musgrave effort. So much has been rehashed, so much become hackneyed.
The Ostwald work goes way too far, even if it is never boring,
although it probably reflects some of the predelictions of the author
rather than its subject. The English can never really comprehend the
inspired artist Schumann, on the whole for them the more workmanlike
and conventional Mendelssohn and Brahms win far more admiration to
their rather limited musical horizons. The use of 'pubic performance'
is truly 'LOL' and risible, and shows how little effort is taken with
proof reading these days. Probably reflects the establishment English
view of Schumann's peripheral stature, but as you say the Schumann
cognoscenti recognize his true achievement and worth (Steven Isserlis
and John Eliot Gardiner are obviously not of this ilk).
I will try to get a copy of this, but it seems to be retreading
familiar ground. I have not yet read Daverio, and he is actually the
next author on my list (just downloaded the ebook versions of 2 of his
Schumann tracts, the biog and the one paired, or perhaps trioed, with
Schubert and Brahms).
I agree with you that the Davidsbuendlertaenze, Peri and Faust are all
mighty works, along with the Kresleriana, the Fantasy in C,
Dichterliebe, the Symphonic Studies, the Eichendorff Liederkreis, et
al. His symphonies are by turns sneered at and damned with faint
praise, but surely they are at the apex of the 19th century symphonic
repertoire along with Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms.
eusebius
Jan 31, 2012, 11:50:17 PM1/31/12
to
Sorry I should have addressed these remarks in a sense to 'Judith',
since you seem to have just cut/paste :)
since you seem to have just cut/paste :)
eusebius
Jan 31, 2012, 11:50:45 PM1/31/12
to
Daverio instead.
Peter T. Daniels
Feb 1, 2012, 7:46:51 AM2/1/12
to
Gardiner did more for Schumann in his series at the Lincoln Center
Festival in 97 or 98 (the summer before he embarked on his absurd, and
disastrous, Bach cantata tour), with all the orchestral works and the
Faustszenen, than any biographer (including the ones on the preconcert
panels with him, which inclujded Daverio and Nancy Reich).
eusebius
Feb 2, 2012, 3:18:21 AM2/2/12
to
read a fair bit of it in quotation and have read a few reviews which
look promising. Not expecting anything revelatory, but on that basis I
am prepared to move Daverio to the top of the (rather mediocre) list.
Yes, Gardiner is a true champion of the music of Schumann (although I
guess he sees himself, and the public see him if they know of him at
all, as a Bach champion and also a creature of the HIP movement- an
unfair limitation IMV).
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