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Robert Schumann

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   Robert Schumann
   Robert Schumann

   Robert Alexander 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.

Biography

Early life

   Robert Schumann was born on June 8, 1810 in Zwickau in Saxony. His
   father was a publisher, and it was in the cultivation of literature
   quite as much as in that of music that his boyhood was spent. Schumann
   himself said that he began to compose before the age of seven.

   At fourteen he wrote an essay on the aesthetics of music and also
   contributed to a volume edited by his father and 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 as well as the most permanent
   of the literary influences exercised upon him was undoubtedly that of
   Johann Paul Friedrich Richter. This influence may clearly be seen in
   his youthful novels Juniusabende and Selene, of which the first only
   was completed in 1826.

   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 (depression), 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.

Carnaval

   Robert Schumann in 1839.
   Robert Schumann in 1839.

   Carnaval (op. 9, 1834) is one of Schumann's most genial and most
   characteristic pianoforte works.

   Schumann begins nearly every section of Carnaval with the musical notes
   signified in German by the letters that spell Asch (A, E-flat, C, and
   B, or alternatively A-flat, C, and B), the town in which Ernestine was
   born, and are also the musical letters in Schumann's own name. Schumann
   named sections for both Ernestine von Fricken ("Estrella") and Clara
   Wieck ("Chiarina"). Eusebius and Florestan, the imaginary figures
   appearing so often in his critical writings, also appear, alongside
   brilliant imitations of Chopin and Paganini. The work comes to a close
   with a march of the Davidsbündler—the league of the men of David
   against the Philistines in which may be heard the clear accents of
   truth in contest with the dull clamour of falsehood embodied in a
   quotation from the seventeenth century Grandfather's Dance. In
   Carnaval, Schumann went farther than in Papillons, for in it he himself
   conceived the story of which it was the musical illustration.

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.
   Clara Schumann, "One of the most soulful and famous pianists of the
   day", said Edvard Grieg
   Clara Schumann, "One of the most soulful and famous pianists of the
   day", said Edvard Grieg

   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, and admittedly the quality, of
   Schumann's works is extremely varied. 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

   Whilst sometimes overlooked in the pantheon of musicians of influence,
   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. Those who seek Schumann, and drink deeply at the source, not
   only receive a deep well of aural pleasure and satisfaction, but
   commune with a pure and transcendent artistic soul of great integrity.
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