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Born: Zwickau, Saxony, June 8, 1810 Died: Bonn, July 29, 1856/ X! O) K0 U/ E; L" H, l
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Schumann’s finest and greatest music is for the piano, closely followed by his songs. Up till 1840 he wrote little else but for the piano, works which are at the heart of every pianist’s repertoire, an enormous proportion of which are played and recorded regularly by every major (and minor) pianist; like Shakespeare’s plays, they provide an unending source of pleasure and challenge in their interpretation. The moods and forms they encompass are myriad, filled with the most poetic flights of fancy and the wildest imagination. Though he wrote successfully in some of the traditional forms (sonata, etc), he added to the Romantic tradition of loosely knit structures the idea of painting many small cameos and welding them all together onto one huge canvas.
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7 V8 b4 P; k9 @After 1840, he wrote less for the piano and more for the voice. Schumann’s sensitivity to literature, to prose and verse, allied with his supreme melodic facility make his songs among the most important gifts to the art of lieder, a successor and companion to Schubert. He brings the same tenderness, passion and humanity to his settings but with touches of irony and self-deprecating wit that is missing from other Romantics.
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/ r3 \7 o" c& m& j( WLike Schubert, Schumann was not as happy with the large forms as he was with the small. Musicologists tut-tut at his orchestration, his inability to find a cohesive structure for the Symphonies and wince at the awkward writing of his chamber music. Yet, back they come again and again, entrancing the listener with their invention and spring-like inspiration. The lyrical beauty he could summon up at will, the warmth and sheer well-being they engender silences criticism after all.
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% ^9 F, r( J( i" J( pThe Life
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Mendelssohn, Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, Verdi and Wagner were born within four years of one another; composers were still writing music under their influence a hundred years later. Schumann is a key figure in the Romantic movement epitomised by these composers; arguably, none investigated the Romantic’s obsession with feeling and passion quite so thoroughly as him. For most of his life, Schumann suffered from an inner torment - he died insane - but then some psychologists argue that madness is a necessary attribute of genius.
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1810 Schumann’s father was a Saxon bookseller and publisher, well-to-do and cultured. Robert was his fifth child and though he and his wife were not musical, they encouraged their son’s musical talents and at the age of 10 he began piano lessons. For a career, however, he was persuaded to study law and Schumann dutifully toddled off to nearby Leipzig where, at the same time, he began piano lessons with his future father-in-law, Friedrich Wieck. O9 b9 t+ U0 R" }2 W
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1829 A series of events then took place, events which twisted and turned the paths along which Schumann might normally have been expected to travel trouble-free. His elder sister Emilie committed suicide and shortly afterwards his father died at the age of 53 from a nervous disease no one has been able to diagnose. (Of Schumann’s three brothers, only one reached late middle age.) Schumann became absorbed in the fashionable Romantic malaise of Weltschmerz (a good German word meaning ‘world-weariness’), exemplified by the writings of Novalis, Byron and Lenau, among others, all who died romantically young in romantically tragic circumstances.
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1 }( g7 l7 Y* ^0 T/ p- W1830 He persuaded his mother and guardian to allow him to study music and the same Friedrich Wieck was recommended. So he returned to the Wiecks’ house where he lodged and boarded, determined to become a world-famous virtuoso like Wieck’s talented young daughter Clara. Schumann’s mature career as a composer dates from about this time.6 o @& F6 H3 |7 I2 @" M
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1832 A second tragic event intervened when he developed some sort of ailment in the index and middle fingers of his right hand. He tried all the fashionable remedies available including, fatally, a mechanical device which purported to help strengthen and lift the middle finger. It left his right hand permanently crippled, so much so that it exempted him from military service - a certificate exists showing that Schumann was unable to pull the trigger on a rifle. That was the end of his ambitions as a concert pianist.
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1833 Worse was to come. Some theories have it that the original trouble to his two fingers was caused by the side-effects of mercury treatment for syphilis. He enjoyed the company of young ladies (he was a handsome man) but from this date onwards he noted unaccountable periods of angst and momentary losses of consciousness, bouts of breathing difficulty and aural hallucinations; he suffered from insomnia and acrophobia and confided in his diary that he was afraid of going mad. He thought of killing himself.: ^* ] H# b& t0 Q( M
5 v3 `' \8 K( N6 s. ]( C' d6 u5 sNevertheless, throughout the decade of the 1830s, Schumann’s career as a composer slowly grew while he also developed his literary activities. In 1834 he co-founded a progressive journal, the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, which fulminated against the vapid salon music of the day. His sharp and perceptive writing made him one of the foremost critics of the day, the first German critic to recognise Chopin (as early as 1831, Schumann writing under the name of Eusebius, wrote his famous welcome “Hats off, gentlemen, a genius!”), among the first to champion Berlioz and predict Brahms’ greatness. Sometimes his judgements have proved to be askew but by and large, Schumann’s musical criticism was as fine as the style and objectivity with which he wrote.
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He also translated his journalistic and musical convictions into real life, as it were. He formed an association of intimate friends which he named Davidsbündler: David against the Philistines - that was the idea - a group that would oppose philistinism in the arts and support passionately all that was new and imaginative. (Schumann immortalised his friends in his piano work Davidsbündlertanze.)* m: t, ^* P, m/ V8 Y
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Concurrent with all this, a fourth event befell him that had the benign effect of inspiring his music to heights which (who knows?) he may not have reached, had he not fallen in love with Clara Wieck and been prevented from marrying her. Perhaps surmising that Schumann was an unstable character, Friedrich Wieck violently opposed the relationship and his actions over the following seven years won him a place in music history, not as the obscure teacher of a great composer or as the father of a great pianist (which Clara would become) but as the disagreeable father-in-law who thwarted Young Love. He forced the couple to separate, opened their love letters and initiated a campaign of personal vilification against his former pupil, so set was he against his daughter’s marriage.
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! H& d' V6 I0 y: p% f _1 l1840 The affair ended in court, judgement went against Wieck and the happy couple were married on September 12 the day before Clara’s 21st birthday. Was it a happy marriage? Schumann’s career as a composer clearly entered a new stage: in 1840 alone he wrote over 100 songs and in 1841, during the space of only four days, he sketched out his Symphony No 1 in B flat, the Spring Symphony. Many other masterful works followed rapidly but, though Clara was intensely ambitious for her husband, the two of them found it hard to balance the need for a pianist to practice and a composer to work in silence. On tour, he found it galling to be introduced at times as ‘the husband of Clara Schumann’ and returned home before her from a concert tour of Russia in 1844. His mental health began to fail, he resigned from the teaching post Mendelssohn had created for him at his new conservatory in Leipzig and in 1844, the Schumann’s moved to Dresden. The great Piano Concerto was composed here, the Second symphony, more songs, but from the late 1840s it was clear that Schumann was becoming increasingly unstable. 6 h$ k" r7 `: F0 [7 Y, f; S* a
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1850 He accepted the post of Director of Music in Düsseldorf. It proved to be a disaster. Schumann was no conductor, a talent which the position pre-eminently demanded, and together with his natural reserve (Liszt and Wagner found him boring) now exaggerated by his inability to communicate and, at times unaware of his surroundings, he was forced to resign.4 d$ I: e: V$ n* J
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1854 Aural hallucinations were now accompanied by visions of demons and angels and on February 27 he tried to kill himself by drowning in the Rhine. He was rescued and placed at his own request in an asylum at Endenich near Bonn. Here, Brahms was one of the few welcome visitors (some sources say Schumann refused to see Clara or any of his seven children, others that Clara would not visit him for fear of upsetting him).
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3 o/ Z( ?* m0 [0 D+ D9 n1856 Schumann lived on in this unhappy state for a further two years. He died in Clara’s arms and was buried the next day in Bonn. Opinions vary as to whether the cause of his final illness was tertiary syphilis, sclerosis of the brain (his own doctor’s verdict) or dementia pracox. Whatever, it was the cruellest and most un-Romantic of ends. |
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