Robert Schumann (1810 – 1856): Fantasie in C Major op 17
I am affected by everything that goes on in the world. That is why my compositions are sometimes difficult to understand, because they are connected with different states of mind; and sometimes striking, because everything extraordinary that happens impresses me, and then impels me to express it in music.
Robert Schumann
Robert Schumann was a man divided. Handsome, charismatic and ebullient, he could also be morose, as well as painfully shy and inarticulate with strangers. A richly imaginative, innovative and occasionally rebellious artist, yet there remained a meek, almost submissive side to his creative personality, one that was in constant need of wise counsel and guidance.
His music could be similarly contradictory and unpredictable. He had a fine understanding of musical history and of its classical canons and structures. At the same time, he was greatly conscious of the Romantic, establishment-challenging sensibilities of the day, many of which seemed perfectly attuned to his own temperament.
He was multi-talented, almost as fine a writer as he was composer. He could be genuinely resourceful, often showing a talent for taking charge of the people around him and once setting up a successful music journal almost single-handedly. And yet in other ways, as a teacher or an orchestral conductor, he was surprisingly inept at communicating his intentions.
Sometimes his exuberance for life could be almost overwhelming: he once admitted to a friend that he was a “bad hand at sitting still… my passions are still too powerful: every day I should like to drink champagne to excite myself. I have to fight very much against myself.”
But just as often he would suffer from fits of crushing depression and paranoid anxiety where the world would close in around him like a “vast cemetery, filled with faded dreams; a garden of cypresses and weeping willows”. When his mental balance began to fail later in life, such images would become tinged with outright horror.
A compulsive self-analyser, no-one was more aware of these sharp contradictions in his personality than Schumann himself. When he later wrote music criticism for a living, he would adopt several personas in his articles, all of them representing different sides to himself.
Few other composers have expressed their identity as freely through their own music. No musicologist or biographer has ever evoked the spirit of Schumann as well as he evoked it himself. His compositions can be exuberant, tender and excitable, and just as often melancholy, introspective and despairing. Separating the man from the music has always been particularly difficult in the case of Robert Schumann and it is perhaps why for many, he is not only their favourite composer, but also favourite musical figure of the nineteenth century.
It is all the more surprising that Schumann wasn’t sure he even wanted to be a musician until around the age of twenty. From his earliest memories in his birth town of Zwickau in lower Saxony, he had always been surrounded by books, and he had grown up reading Greek tragedies alongside the likes of Hegel, Schopenhauer, Schiller, Goethe, Byron and (his own personal favourite) Jean Paul Friedrich Richter*.
*Richter would inspire two youthful novels written by Schumann in his mid-teens – Juniusabende and Selene.
Robert’s father Friedrich August Gottlob had defied the wishes of his own parents (who wanted him to become a merchant) in order to set himself up, after many trials and tribulations, as a successful writer, editor and translator, before opening his own book store in Zwickau, Gebrüder Schumann. He would make a small fortune from his own German translations of Walter Scott and Byron, thus providing Robert and his four siblings a comfortable upbringing and education.
According to a later autobiographical fragment, Robert was duly enrolled at a private school “at the age of 6 ½… I was seven when I started to learn Latin, eight when I began French and Greek and 9 ½ when I joined the fourth class at our Lyceum.” During this same period he developed a habit of falling in love with female class-mates. He would record one such precocious romance, a certain girl with whom he shared a kiss before spending all of his pocket money to buy her sweets every day. Sadly, the liaison did not last, with Robert eventually growing weary of the girl’s changeable “moods”. He was then around twelve years old.
Although a slightly distant figure in his early childhood, Schumann senior would become a great supporter of Robert in his early teens, encouraging his son with both his musical and writing endeavours. He was able to procure all kinds of rare piano music for him through his book-publishing contacts and, when Robert was just fourteen, he would invite him to contribute an essay for an anthology which he was preparing (Portraits of Famous Men). August even wrote to the great Carl Maria von Weber, asking him to teach his son music. Weber gave his assent but then sadly succumbed to tuberculosis before any lessons could be fixed up.
When August himself suddenly died in 1826, he left Robert bereft in more ways than one. Of all the adult figures in Robert’s youth, it’s quite possible that the gentle and empathetic August would have best understood his son’s subsequent struggles to find his artistic identity, and not least where it contravened his own family’s wishes, as he himself had once gone through a very similar process.
For Robert’s widowed mother Christiane, it was much more a question of practicalities as she desperately wanted her son to land himself a stable, well-paid profession. August had already stipulated in his will that Robert must attend a university for at least three years in order to receive his inheritance, and Christiane, who regarded him as “the star of my hope”, decreed that her youngest son should study law at Leipzig.
Robert hated his studies almost from the word go and constantly complained about them to his mother. Leipzig itself was “disgusting” and noisy, while the surrounding countryside was bland in comparison to the forested mountains near Zwickau. “The dry study of the law, which crushes one at the very beginning with its cut-and-dried definitions, does not suit me at all”, he told her. “I will not study medicine, and cannot study theology. This is the kind of perpetual struggle that I am in with myself, and I look in vain for a guide who can tell me what to do.”
Much of his work on his legal studies would take place in a half-distracted state, with his piano a constant temptation (typically he would “edge in a Schubert waltz between Roman Law and the Pandects”). He spent much of his time fencing, playing chess or drinking. At parties and social events, he would improvise on the piano and paint suggestive musical portraits of his friends – “ay, he could sketch the different dispositions of his intimate friends by certain figures and passages on the piano so exactly and comically that everyone burst into loud laughter at the similitude of the portrait”, recalled one contemporary.
Eventually he told his mother that he would have to shoot himself “from boredom” were he forced to keep studying law. Though his mother was unbudging, Schumann finally found a way out anyway, announcing that he was going to take intensive lessons from an ambitious provincial piano teacher named Friedrich Wieck in Leipzig. Although Wieck was strict and conservative in nature and had his own reservations about Robert, he recognized his already unusual talent and was able to assure an anxious Christiane Schumann that, so long as he put the work in, her son could become one of Europe’s finest pianists in just a few years.
Having moved in with Wieck and his young family, Schumann was diligent in following his teacher’s draconian regime, often practicing the piano for up to seven hours a day. His progress was only halted when he managed to permanently injure a finger on his right hand, rendering it impossible for him to realise his performing ambitions*. Unable to face a return to the law, he now turned to music-writing and composition instead.
*The cause of Schumann career-changing injury remains unclear to this day, with some musicologists suggesting it was a side-effect of medication Schumann was taking for syphilis contracted sometime in his late teens. But the once-discredited idea that he hurt his hand using a home-made hand strengthening contraption has gained fresh impetus in recent years, with new letters on the subject having come to light.
He stayed in close touch with Wieck, whom he had come to regard as a father figure. But over time he would also develop an attraction towards Wieck’s eldest daughter, Clara, then in her mid-teens and a very promising pianist in her own right. The two finally declared their love for each other in 1835, when Clara was 16 and Robert around 25. But when Clara’s father found out, he was aghast and banned the two of them from seeing each other. It would mark the start of a long and painful struggle for the two young lovebirds to be together, as an over-protective Wieck grew ever more demented in his efforts to keep them apart. They kept in contact by secret correspondence and by the same means became unofficially engaged on 14 August 1837.
Schumann’s lengthy battle to marry Clara Wieck would become a defining theme of his twenties, the decade in which he also came of age as a composer and music critic. Having already started writing for the illustrious Leipzig journal Allgemeine Musik Zeittung in 1831, with the aid of a couple of friends and against all the odds, he managed to set up the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (The New Journal for Music) in 1834, a publication which flourishes to this day. Schumann quickly developed a lively and very distinctive style of writing. Avoiding too much dry analysis (he once admitted a visceral hatred of music theory), his whimsical and inventive narratives could more closely resemble short stories than serious music critiques.
A key to Schumann’s approach was his playful invention of three pseudonyms, all representing different sides to his personality. There was Eusebius (moody, introverted), Florestan (ebullient, impatient, provocative) and Meister Raro (whose wisdom united his two opposites with that of his true love – ClaRa + Robert). The personalities of Eusebius and Florestan would also start to appear in his compositions of the 1830s.
His very first review was of a work by a young, obscure composer who went by the name of Frédéric Chopin. Yet Schumann’s alter-egos were quick to see a great artist in the making:
Eusebius quietly opened the door the other day. You know the ironic smile on his pale face, with which he invites attention. I was sitting at the piano with Florestan. As you know, he is one of those rare musical personalities who seem to anticipate everything that is new, extraordinary, and meant for the future. But today he was in for a surprise. Eusebius showed us a piece of music and exclaimed: “Hats off, gentlemen, a genius”.
With the Chopin article, Schumann would start as he meant to go on, a sensitive, generous-minded observer, always alert to the new currents and talents, and able to find the positives in even the least interesting music. Unlike so many other artistic figures of his age (or indeed of any age), he appeared to have absolutely no qualms or petty jealousies about promoting potential rivals.
Over the course of the 1830s he would bring the still unknown Franz Schubert to a wider audience for the first time. And despite being at odds with some of his artistic aims, he would introduce the music of Hector Berlioz to the German-speaking world, recognizing the substance behind the Frenchman’s seemingly unruly manner. He would also promote the works of Mendelssohn and Liszt, becoming good friends with both.
His relationship with Felix Mendelssohn was perhaps the closest he ever had with a fellow composer, and on the surface at least, the two men appeared to have much in common. Born within eighteen months of one another, both were widely educated (unusually so for most professional musicians of their day), both were devoted to Beethoven and Bach, and both channeled their romantic sensibilities into predominantly classical forms.
But their differences, less immediately apparent, were almost more interesting. Schumann had had to fight for his place in the world far more than his precocious colleague, who had achieved an astonishing mastery of his craft while still in his mid-teens. Mendelssohn was also a fundamentally more confident man than Schumann, and much more successful in his practical work as a musician – while Schumann was almost useless with a baton in hand, Mendelssohn was one of the finest conductors of his day. Schumann looked up to him in many ways, once saying of him, “he is a real God”.
What Mendelssohn perhaps lacked was a little of Schumann’s vivid, almost Hamlet-esque inner world, something that could often inspire more risks and novelties in the latter’s music. And where Mendelssohn might have regarded it as vulgar to put too much of his own identity into his music, Schumann’s own oeuvre is positively flooded with autobiographical material and references.
This is no more true than in the substantial body of solo piano music which Schumann wrote throughout the 1830s, a time in which he was artistically blossoming while struggling to win the right to marry his sweetheart, Clara Weick.
His Papillons op 2 (1831) is a series of waltzes based upon a masked ball in Jean Paul Richter’s Flegeljahre (The Awkward Age), a novel which the young Schumann adored, treating it like his own personal bible for many years.
Another example from this period is his Carnaval (1835), made up of the 21 miniatures deriving from the notes A-S-C-H (German notation for A-Eb-C-B), a musical cryptogram spelling the name of a Bohemian town where one of his sweethearts lived (this was just before the time of Clara).
His 1837 piano suite, Davidsbündlertänze (Dances in the League of David) refers to an (imaginary) organisation which Schumann had set up, the Davidsbündler*, whose purpose was to defend the new trends of enlightened Romanticism from empty, showy “philistinism”, predominant in many European musical circles. The eighteen pieces which make up the score, take their starting point from a waltz written by Clara and are credited on the score to Schumann’s two alter egos, Florestan (for the more passionate numbers) and Eusebius (for the more dreamy).
*Among its honorary members were Chopin, Paganini and Clara, as well as Florestan and Eusebius, a vivid demonstration of how Schumann’s complicated inner life could sometimes become mixed up with the outer world.
But one of the very finest piano compositions from this still relatively youthful period in Schumann’s output is the Fantasie in C Major, dating from 1836. Schumann originally intended to use the funds from the work to contribute towards a proposed monument of Beethoven in Bonn, and the gravitas, pathos and depth of feeling in the work all serve as an unmistakable homage to the great composer.
But there are other elements at play too. Having originally entitled the majestic first movement “Ruins”, he told Clara that it “may well be the most passionate I have ever composed – a deep lament for you.” At the time they were facing a long separation, their future together deeply uncertain.
The movement itself begins most ambiguously with a blur of harmonies and textures, the right hand playing a stately theme against cascades of rapid notes in the left. Gradually the movement finds its shape and its main themes, a solemn and tragic melody in C minor providing its emotional centre-point.
The second movement is a manically exuberant march in E Flat major, full of dotted, syncopated rhythms. The music’s rambunctious mood, as well as its ambitiously large chords and daring dissonances, is unmistakably Schumann in one of his most Florestan veins.
By contrast, the final movement in C Major is clearly the handiwork of Eusebius. With its calm, arpeggiated quavers and rich sonorities in the lower registers of the piano, it is one of the most beautiful and moving things Schumann ever wrote. Although the mood is serene enough on the surface, it is full of profound emotion and even tension, as the music charts its course through a complex sequence of keys. The movement slowly builds to two main climaxes, before winding down in the softest, most tender tones.
The work was dedicated to Franz Liszt, who called it a “noble work, worthy of LV Beethoven.” When Liszt came to write his great solo piano masterpiece, his Sonata in B Minor sixteen years later, he in turn dedicated it to Schumann.