Robert Schumann
Robert Schumann was a German composer, pianist, and music critic of the early Romantic era. He composed in all the main musical genres of the time, writing for solo piano, voice and piano, chamber groups, orchestra, choir and the opera. His works typify the spirit of the Romantic era in German music.
Schumann was born in Zwickau, Saxony, to an affluent middle-class family with no musical connections, and was initially unsure whether to pursue a career as a lawyer or to make a living as a pianist-composer. He studied law at the universities of Leipzig and Heidelberg but his main interests were music and Romantic literature. From 1829 he was a student of the piano teacher Friedrich Wieck, but his hopes for a career as a virtuoso pianist were frustrated by a worsening problem with his right hand, and he concentrated on composition. His early works were mainly piano pieces, including the large-scale Carnaval, Davidsbündlertänze, Fantasiestücke, Op. 12, Kreisleriana and Kinderszenen . He was a co-founder of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik in 1834 and edited it for ten years. In his writing for the journal and in his music he distinguished between two contrasting aspects of his personality, dubbing these alter egos "Florestan" for his impetuous self and "Eusebius" for his gentle poetic side.
Despite the bitter opposition of Wieck, who did not regard his pupil as a suitable husband for her, Schumann married Wieck's daughter Clara in 1840. In the years immediately following their wedding Schumann composed prolifically, writing, first, songs and song‐cycles including Frauen-Liebe und Leben and Dichterliebe. He turned his attention to orchestral music in 1841, completing the first of his four symphonies. In the following year he concentrated on chamber music, writing three string quartets, a Piano Quintet and a Piano Quartet. During the rest of the 1840s, between bouts of mental and physical ill health, he composed a variety of piano and other pieces and went with his wife on concert tours in Europe. His only opera, Genoveva, was not a success and has seldom been staged since.
Schumann and his family moved to Düsseldorf 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 für 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.
During his lifetime Schumann was recognised for his piano music – often subtly programmatic – and his songs. His other works were less generally admired, and for many years there was a widespread belief that those from his later years lacked the inspiration of his early music. More recently this view has been less prevalent, but it is still his piano works and songs from the 1830s and 1840s on which his reputation is primarily based. He had considerable influence in the nineteenth century and beyond. In the German-speaking world the composers Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg and more recently Wolfgang Rihm have been inspired by his music, as were French composers such as Georges Bizet, Gabriel Fauré, Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel. Schumann was also a major influence on the Russian school of composers, including Anton Rubinstein and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.
Life and career
Childhood
Robert Schumann was born in Zwickau, in the Kingdom of Saxony, into an affluent middle-class family. On 13 June 1810 the local newspaper, the Zwickauer Wochenblatt, carried the announcement, "On 8 June to Herr August Schumann, notable citizen and bookseller here, a little son". He was the fifth and last child of August Schumann and his wife, Johanna Christiane. 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. Robert, his favourite child, was able to spend many hours exploring the classics of literature in his father's collection. Intermittently, between the ages of three and five-and-a-half, he was placed with foster parents, as his mother had contracted typhus.At the age of six Schumann went to a private preparatory school, where he remained for four years. When he was seven he began studying general music and piano with the local organist, Johann Gottfried Kuntsch, and for a time he also had cello and flute lessons with one of the municipal musicians, Carl Gottlieb Meissner. 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. He was not a musical child prodigy like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart or Felix Mendelssohn, but his talent as a pianist was evident from an early age: in 1850 the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 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. 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. 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. 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 Zauberflöte and Carlsbad to hear the celebrated pianist Ignaz Moscheles.
University
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, he never set foot in a lecture hall, but he himself recorded, "I am industrious and regular, and enjoy my jurisprudence ... and am only now beginning to appreciate its true worth". Nonetheless reading and playing the piano occupied a good deal of his time, and he developed expensive tastes for champagne and cigars. Musically, he discovered the works of Franz Schubert, whose death in November 1828 caused Schumann to cry all night. The leading piano teacher in Leipzig was Friedrich Wieck, who recognised Schumann's talent and accepted him as a pupil.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. 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". Another influence on him was hearing the violin virtuoso Niccolò Paganini play in Frankfurt in April 1830. 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". 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". 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.
1830s
Later in 1830 Schumann published his Op. 1, a set of piano variations on a theme based on the name of its supposed dedicatee, Countess Pauline von Abegg. The notes A-B♭-E-G-G, played in waltz tempo, make up the theme on which the variations are based. The use of a musical cryptogram became a recurrent characteristic of Schumann's later music. In 1831 he began lessons in harmony and counterpoint with Heinrich Dorn, musical director of the Saxon court theatre, and in 1832 he published his Op. 2, Papillons for piano, a programmatic piece depicting twin brothers – one a poetic dreamer, the other a worldly realist – both in love with the same woman at a masked ball. Schumann had by now come to regard himself as having two distinct sides to his personality and art: he dubbed his introspective, pensive self "Eusebius" and the impetuous and dynamic alter ego "Florestan". Reviewing an early work of Chopin in 1831 he wrote:Schumann's pianistic ambitions were ended by a growing paralysis in at least one finger of his right hand. The early symptoms had come while he was still a student at Heidelberg, and the cause is uncertain. He tried all the treatments then in vogue including allopathy, homeopathy, and electric therapy, but without success. The condition had the advantage of exempting him from compulsory military service – he could not fire a rifle – but by 1832 he recognised that a career as a virtuoso pianist was impossible and he shifted his main focus to composition. He completed further sets of small piano pieces and the first movement of a symphony. An additional activity was journalism. From March 1834, along with Wieck and others, he was on the editorial board of a new music magazine, Neue Leipziger Zeitschrift für Musik, which was reconstituted under his sole editorship in January 1835 as the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. Hall writes that it took "a thoughtful and progressive line on the new music of the day". Among the contributors were friends and colleagues of Schumann, writing under pen names: he included them in his Davidsbündler – a band of fighters for musical truth, named after the Biblical hero who fought against the Philistines – a product of the composer's imagination in which, blurring the boundaries of imagination and reality, he included his musical friends.
During successive months in 1835 Schumann met three musicians whom he regarded with particular respect: Felix Mendelssohn, Chopin and Moscheles. 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. 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, a fellow pupil of Wieck. The musical themes of Carnaval derive from the name of her home town, Asch. The Symphonic Studies are based on a melody said to be by Ernestine's father, Baron von Fricken, an amateur flautist. 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. 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. In a letter in 1837 he acknowledged that learning of Ernestine's poverty weighed heavily on him, fearing that, given his own precarious finances and her lack of independent means, their marriage would condemn him to "work for daily bread like an artisan".
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. According to Chissell, her concerto debut at the Leipzig Gewandhaus on 9 November 1828, 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". 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. 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. 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.
Professionally the later years of the 1830s were marked by an unsuccessful attempt by Schumann to establish himself in Vienna, and a growing friendship with Mendelssohn, who was by then based in Leipzig, conducting the Gewandhaus Orchestra. During this period Schumann wrote many piano works, including Kreisleriana, Davidsbündlertänze, Kinderszenen and Faschingsschwank aus Wien. In 1838 Schumann visited Schubert's brother Ferdinand and discovered several manuscripts including that of the Great C major Symphony. Ferdinand allowed him to take a copy away and Schumann arranged for the work's premiere, conducted by Mendelssohn in Leipzig on 21 March 1839. In the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik Schumann wrote enthusiastically about the work and described its "himmlische Länge" – its "heavenly length" – a phrase that has become common currency in later analyses of the symphony.
Schumann and Clara finally married on 12 September 1840, the day before her twenty-first birthday. Hall writes that marriage gave Schumann "the emotional and domestic stability on which his subsequent achievements were founded". 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.