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Robert Schumann (June 8, 1810 – July 29, 1856) was a German composer and
pianist. He was one of the most famous Romantic composers of the nineteenth
century, as well as a famous music critic.
An intellectual as well as an aesthete, his music reflects the deeply personal
nature of Romanticism. Introspective and often whimsical, his early music was an
attempt to break with the tradition of classical forms and structure which he
thought too restrictive. Little understood in his lifetime, much of his music is
now regarded as daringly original in harmony, rhythm and form. He stands in the
front rank of German Romantics.
 Early
life
Robert Schumann was born on June 8, 1810, in Zwickau in Saxony. His father was a
publisher, and his boyhood was spent in the cultivation of literature quite as much
as in music. Schumann himself said that he began to compose before the age of seven
years.
At fourteen he wrote an essay on the aesthetics of music and also contributed to a
volume, edited by his father, entitled "Portraits of Famous Men". While still at
school in Zwickau he read, besides Friedrich Schiller and Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe, Lord Byron and the Greek tragedians. But the most powerful and permanent
literary influence was that of Johann Paul Friedrich Richter. This influence is
seen in his youthful novels Juniusabende, completed in 1826, and Selene.
In 1828 he left school, and after a tour, during which he met Heinrich Heine in
Munich, he went to Leipzig to study law. His interest in music was piqued as child
by the sounds of Ignaz Moscheles playing at Carlsbad and even more so by the works
of Franz Schubert and Felix Mendelssohn later. His father, however, who had
encouraged the boy's musical aspirations, died in 1826, and neither his mother nor
his guardian would encourage a career for him in music.
So Schumann set out to study law, at Leipzig and later at Heidelberg (1829).
However he abandoned the pursuit, and instead, to use his own words, "Nature's
pupil pure and simple" began composing songs.
1830-1834
The restless spirit by which he was pursued is disclosed in his letters of the
period. On Easter, 1830 he heard Niccolò Paganini play in Frankfurt. In July in
this year he wrote to his mother, "My whole life has been a struggle between Poetry
and Prose, or call it Music and Law," and by Christmas he was once more in Leipzig,
taking piano lessons with his old master, Friedrich Wieck.
In his anxiety to accelerate the process by which he could acquire a perfect
execution, he permanently injured his right hand. Another authority states that the
right-hand disability was caused by syphilis medication. Those who claim the former
state that he attempted a radical surgical procedure to separate the tendons of the
fourth finger from those of the third (the ring finger musculature is linked to
that of the third finger, thus making it the "weakest" finger). Another, less
dramatic view is that he damaged his finger by the use of a mechanism of his own
invention, which was intended to hold back one finger while he practiced exercises
with the others. Regardless, his ambitions as a pianist being suddenly ruined, he
determined to devote himself entirely to composition, and began a course of theory
under Heinrich Dorn, conductor of the Leipzig opera. About this time he
contemplated composing an opera on the subject of Hamlet.
Papillons
The fusion of the literary idea with its musical illustration, which may be said to
have first taken shape in Papillons (op. 2), is foreshadowed to some extent in the
first criticism by Schumann, an essay on Frédéric Chopin's variations on a theme
from Mozart's Don Giovanni, which appeared in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung
in 1831. Here the work is discussed by the imaginary characters Florestan (the
embodiment of Schumann's passionate, voluble side) and Eusebius (his dreamy,
introspective side) -the counterparts of Vult and Walt in Jean Paul's novel
Flegeljahre; and a third, Meister Raro, is called upon for his opinion. Raro may
represent either the composer himself, Wieck's daughter Clara, or the combination
of the two (Clara + Robert).
By the time, however, that Schumann had written Papillons in 1831 he went a step
further. The scenes and characters of his favorite novelist had now passed
definitely and consciously into the written music, and in a letter from Leipzig
(April 1832) he bids his brothers "read the last scene in Jean Paul's Flegeljahre
as soon as possible, because the Papillons are intended as a musical representation
of that masquerade."
In the winter of 1832 Schumann visited his relations at Zwickau and Schneeberg,
where he performed the first movement of his Symphony in G minor. In Zwickau, the
music was played at a concert given by Wieck's daughter Clara, who was then only
thirteen. The death of his brother Julius as well as that of his sister-in-law
Rosalie in 1833 seems to have affected Schumann with a profound melancholy, leading
to his first apparent attempt at suicide.
Die neue
Zeitschrift für Musik
By the spring of 1834, however, he had sufficiently recovered to be able to start
Die Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, the paper in which appeared the greater part of his
critical writings. The first number was published on 3 April 1834. It effected a
revolution in the taste of the time, when Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van
Beethoven and Carl Maria von Weber were being neglected for composers who are,
today, considered minor figures. The popular taste at the time ran toward flashy
displays of technique, without much in the areas of content or ideas; Schumann
campaigned to revive interest in the great composers of the past, while also
intervening on behalf of new composers who were attempting to create something more
substantial. To bestow praise on Chopin and Hector Berlioz in those days was to
court the charge of eccentricity in taste, yet the genius of both these masters was
appreciated and openly proclaimed in the new journal. On the other hand, the "Music
of the Future," as was called the compositional school of Franz Liszt and Richard
Wagner, was condemned by Schumann. Amongst his associates involved with the
publication, were the composers Ludwig Schunke, dedicatee of Schumann's Toccata in
C, and Norbert Burgmueller.
Schumann's editorial duties, which kept him closely occupied during the summer of
1834, were interrupted by his relations with Ernestine von Fricken, a girl of
sixteen, to whom he became engaged.
She was the adopted daughter of a rich Bohemian, from whose variations on a
theme Schumann constructed his own Symphonic Etudes. The engagement was broken off
by Schumann, due to the burgeoning of his love for the 15-year-old Clara Wieck.
Flirtatious exchanges in the spring of 1835 led to their first kiss on the steps
outside Wieck’s house in November and mutual declarations of love the next month in
Zwickau, where Clara appeared in concert. Having learnt in August of Ernestine von
Fricken’s illegitimate birth and fearful that her limited means would force him to
earn his living like a ‘day-labourer’, Schumann engineered a complete break towards
the end of the year. But his idyll with Clara was soon brought to an unceremonious
end. Her father became aware of their nocturnal trysts during the Christmas
holidays and summarily called them to a halt.
1835-1839
On October 3, 1835 Schumann met Mendelssohn at Wieck's house in Leipzig, and his
appreciation of his great contemporary was shown with the same generous freedom
that distinguished him in all his relations to other musicians, and which later
enabled him to recognize the genius of Johannes Brahms, whom he first met in 1853
before he had established a reputation.
In 1836 Schumann's acquaintance with Clara Wieck, already famous as a pianist,
ripened into love, and a year later he asked her father's consent to their
marriage, but was met with a refusal. In the series Fantasiestücke for the piano
(op. 12) he once more gives a sublime illustration of the fusion of literary and
musical ideas as embodied conceptions in such pieces as Warum and In der Nacht.
After he had written the latter of these two he detected in the music the fanciful
suggestion of a series of episodes from the story of Hero and Leander. The
collection begins (in Des Abends) with a notable example of Schumann's predeliction
for rhythmic ambiguity, as unrelieved syncopation plays heavily against the time
signature just as in the first movement of Fasschingschwank aus Wien. After a
nicely told fable, and the appropriately titled "Whirring Dreams," the whole
collection ends on an introspective note in the manner of Eusebius.
The Kinderszenen, completed in 1838, a favourite of Schumann's piano works, is
playful and childlike, and in a wonderfully fresh way captures the innocence of
childhood. The Träumerei is one of the most famous piano pieces ever written, and
exists in myriad forms and transcriptions, and has been the favourite encore of
several artists, including Vladimir Horowitz. Although deceptively simple, Alban
Berg, in reply to charges that modern music was overly complex, pointed out that
this piece is in no way as simple as it appears in its harmonic structure. The
whole collection is deceptive in its simplicity, yet genuinely touching and
refreshing.
The Kreisleriana, which is considered one of his greatest works, was also written
in 1838, and in this the composer's fantasy and emotional range is again carried a
step further. Johannes Kreisler, the romantic poet brought into contact with the
real world, was a character drawn from life by the poet E. T. A. Hoffmann (q.v.),
and Schumann utilized him as an imaginary mouthpiece for the sonic expression of
emotional states, in music that is "fantastic and mad".
The Fantasia in C (Op. 17), written in the summer of 1836, is a work of passion and
deep pathos, imbued with the spirit of late Beethoven. This is no doubt deliberate,
since the proceeds from sales of the work were initially intended to be contributed
towards the construction of a monument to Beethoven. According to Liszt,
(Strelezki- Personal Recollections of Chats with Liszt) who played the work to the
composer, and to whom the work was dedicated, the Fantasy was apt to be played too
heavily, and should have a dreamier (träumerisch) character than vigorous German
pianists tended to labour. He also said, "It is a noble work, worthy of Beethoven,
whose career, by the way, it is supposed to represent."
After a visit to Vienna during which he discovered Schubert's previously unknown
Symphony No. 9 in C, in 1839 he wrote the Faschingsschwank aus Wien, i.e. the
Carnival Prank from Vienna. Most of the joke is in the central section of the first
movement, into which a thinly veiled reference to the “Marseillaise”—then banned in
Vienna—is squeezed. The festive mood does not preclude moments of melancholic
introspection in the Intermezzo.
As Wieck still withheld his consent to their marriage, Robert and Clara at last
dispensed with it, and were married on September 12 at Schönefeld, near
Leipzig.
1840-1849
The year 1840 may be said to have yielded the most extraordinary results in
Schumann's career. Until now he had written almost solely for the pianoforte, but
in this one year he wrote 168 songs. Schumann's biographers represent him as caught
in a tempest of song, the sweetness, the doubt and the despair of which are all to
be attributed to varying emotions aroused by his love for Clara. Although there is
possibly some truth to this, this rather mawkish view is treated with scepticism by
modern scholars, especially since Dichterliebe, with its themes of rejection and
acceptance, was written at a time when his marriage was no longer in doubt.
His chief song-cycles of this period were his settings of the Liederkreis of J. von
Eichendorff (op. 39), the Frauenliebe und Leben of Chamisso (op. 42), the
Dichterliebe of Heine (op. 48) and Myrthen, a collection of songs, including poems
by Goethe, Rückert, Heine, Byron, Burns and Moore. The songs Belsatzar (op. 57) and
Die beiden Grenadiere (op. 49), each to Heine's words, show Schumann at his best as
a ballad writer, though the dramatic ballad is less congenial to him than the
introspective lyric. The opus 35 (to words of Justinus Kerner) and opus 40 sets,
although less well known, also contain songs of lyric and dramatic quality.
As Grillparzer said, "He has made himself a new ideal world in which he moves
almost as he wills."
Yet it was not until long afterwards that he met with adequate recognition. In his
lifetime the few tokens of honour bestowed upon Schumann were the degree of Doctor
by the University of Jena in 1840, and in 1843 a professorship in the
Conservatorium of Leipzig, which was founded that year by Felix Mendelssohn. On one
occasion, accompanying his wife on a concert tour in Russia, Schumann was asked
whether 'he too was a musician'. This and other insults left a mark on Schumann's
delicate psyche.
Probably no composer ever rivaled Schumann in concentrating his energies on one
form of music at a time. At first all his creative impulses were translated into
pianoforte music, then followed the miraculous year of the songs. In 1841 he wrote
two of his four symphonies. The year 1842 was devoted to the composition of chamber
music, and includes the pianoforte quintet (op. 44), now one of his best known and
most admired works. In 1843 he wrote Paradise and the Peri, his first essay at
concerted vocal music.
He had now mastered the separate forms, and from this time forward his compositions
are not confined during any particular period to any one of them. In Schumann,
above all musicians, the acquisition of technical knowledge was closely bound up
with the growth of his own experience and the impulse to express it.
The stage in his life when he was deeply engaged in his music to Goethe's Faust
(1844-1853) was a critical one for his health. The first half of the year 1844 had
been spent with his wife in Russia. On returning to Germany he had abandoned his
editorial work, and left Leipzig for Dresden, where he suffered from persistent
“nervous prostration” which is today known as bipolar disorder. As soon as he began
to work he was seized with fits of shivering, and an apprehension of death which
was exhibited in an abhorrence for high places, for all metal instruments (even
keys) and for drugs. He suffered perpetually also from imagining that he had the
note A sounding in his ears. In 1846 he had recovered and in the winter revisited
Vienna, traveling to Prague and Berlin in the spring of 1847 and in the summer to
Zwickau, where he was received with enthusiasm, gratifying because Dresden and
Leipzig were the only large cities in which his fame was at this time
appreciated.
To 1848 belongs his only opera, Genoveva (op. 81), a work containing much beautiful
music, but lacking dramatic force. It is interesting for its attempt to abolish the
recitative, which Schumann regarded as an interruption to the musical flow. The
subject of Genoveva, based on Johann Ludwig Tieck and Hebbel, was in itself not a
particularly happy choice; but it is worth remembering that as early as 1842 the
possibilities of German opera had been keenly realized by Schumann, who wrote, "Do
you know my prayer as an artist, night and morning? It is called 'German Opera.'
Here is a real field for enterprise . . . something simple, profound, German." And
in his notebook of suggestions for the text of operas are found amongst others:
Nibelungen, Lohengrin and Til Eulenspiegel. Schumann's consistently flowing melody
in this work, can be seen as a forerunner to Wagner's Melos.
The music to Byron's Manfred is pre-eminent in a year (1849) in which he wrote more
than in any other. The insurrection of Dresden caused Schumann to move to Kreischa,
a little village a few miles outside the city. In the August of this year, on the
occasion of the hundredth anniversary of Goethe's birth, such scenes of Schumann's
Faust as were already completed were performed in Dresden, Leipzig and Weimar,
Liszt, as always giving unwearied assistance and encouragement. The rest of the
work was written in the latter part of the year, and the overture in 1853. This
overture Schumann described as "one of the sturdiest of my creations."
After
1850
From 1850 to 1854, the nature of Schumann's works is extremely varied. There exists
the popular belief that his music had a precipitious decay in quality; recent
scholarship has demonstrated that this is not so, and that the composer was lucidly
experimenting and changing his previous styles.
In 1850, he succeeded Ferdinand Hiller as musical director at Düsseldorf; in
1851-1853, he visited Switzerland and Belgium as well as Leipzig. In 1851, he
completed his so-called Rhenish symphony, and he revised what would be published as
his fourth symphony. In October 1853, he was bowled over by the talent of the
20-year-old Brahms, who had appeared on his doorstep and spent a month with the
Schumanns. During this time Schumann, Brahms and Schumann's pupil Albert Dietrich
collaborated on the composition of the 'F-A-E' Sonata for the violinist Joseph
Joachim; Schumann also published an article, “Neue Bahnen” (New Paths) hailing the
unknown from Hamburg as “the Chosen One” who would “give ideal expression to the
Age.” In January 1854, Schumann went to Hannover, where he heard a performance of
his Paradise and the Peri organized by Joachim and Brahms.
Soon after his return to Düsseldorf, where he was engaged in editing his complete
works and making an anthology on the subject of music, a renewal of the symptoms
that had threatened him before showed itself. Besides the single note, he now
imagined that voices sounded in his ear. One night he suddenly left his bed, saying
that Schubert and Mendelssohn had sent him a theme - actually a reminiscence of his
violin concerto - which he must write down, and on this theme he wrote five
variations for the pianoforte, his last work. Brahms published the theme in a
supplementary volume to the complete edition of Schumann's piano music, and in 1861
himself wrote a substantial set of variations upon it, for piano duet, his
op.23.
On February 27, 1854, Schumann threw himself into the Rhine. He was rescued by
boatmen, but when brought to land was determined to be quite insane. When Schumann
requested that he be taken to an asylum, Dr. Franz Richarz's sanitarium in
Endenich, a quarter of Bonn, was chosen. After decades of speculation by
pathologists, musicians, biographers and music lovers, the publication of Dr.
Richarz's records on his most celebrated patient point conclusively to the effects
of tertiary syphilis as the underlying cause of Schumann's many physical and mental
illnesses. This, in addition to his introspective, withdrawn character and the
treatments he endured, particularly mercury applications, contributed to his
ultimate demise.
He died on July 29, 1856. He was buried at the Zentral Friedhof, Bonn. In 1880, a
statue by A. Donndorf was erected on his tomb.
According to studies by the musicologist and literary scholar Eric Sams, Schumann's
symptoms during his terminal illness and death appear consistent with those of
mercury poisoning. Mercury was at the time a common treatment for syphilis and many
other conditions.
From the time of her husband's death, Clara devoted herself principally to the
interpretation of her husband's works, but when in 1856 she first visited England
the critics received Schumann's music with a degree of coolness, and in some
quarters (especially in the person of Henry Fothergill Chorley) a chorus of
disapprobation. She returned to London in 1865 and continued her visits annually;
with the exception of four seasons, she appeared each year. She became the
authoritative editor of her husband's works for Breitkopf und Härtel. It was
rumored that she and her good friend, Brahms, destroyed many of Schumann's later
works that they thought to be tainted by his madness. However, apart from the Five
Pieces for Cello and Piano no other pieces are known to have actually been
destroyed. As a result of their survival most of the late works, particularly the
violin concerto, the Fantasy for Violin and Orchestra and the third violin sonata,
all from 1853, have entered the critical and performing repertoire as recognized
masterpieces.
Legacy
It is undoubtedly true that Schumann exercised considerable influence in the
nineteenth century, and beyond, despite his adoption of more conservative modes of
composition after his marriage. He left an array of great music in virtually all
the forms then known, and his romantic notions of the musician as an artist, as
sublime, indelibly changed the perception of what being a composer really meant,
and means. Through his protege Brahms, and also others with the stamp of true
romanticism yet romanticism undefiled, such as Gabriel Fauré and Elgar, ("my
ideal", he said of Schumann), as well as many somewhat lesser figures who betray a
distinct musical resemblance, such as Charles Villiers Stanford, Hubert Parry,
Verhulst, Adolf Jensen and the master miniaturist, Edvard Grieg, Schumann's ideals
and compositional vocabulary have become widely disseminated. Aside from his music,
his critical acumen in encouraging anything worthy yet denouncing the meretricious,
such as the overblown spectacles of Meyerbeer and the vacuities of Charles-Valentin
Alkan—"inward emptiness, outward nothingness" was the verdict in a review of some
Alkan pieces—, set a standard that is still aspired to today. While his dismissal
of Alkan was misguided, excellence in music criticism as well as aspiration to the
highest ideals in art were embodied by Schumann, and both precepts rely critically
even in their conception to Schumann's musical idealism.
Source : Some of the information on this page came
from a Wikipedia article and is licensed under the GNU Documentation
License. ©2008 www.geneticmatrix.com.
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Robert
Schumann - Manifesting Generator - Biography
