Robert Schumann (1810 – 1856): Symphony no 3 in E Flat Major (“Rhenish”)
Things seemed to be going well for Robert Schumann. His career was flourishing, while marriage and fatherhood appeared to have stabilized his once youthful waywardness: “I have learned to command my music and myself better”, he declared. A new artistic maturity was ready to bloom: having previously written solely for piano, he now had the confidence to expand his creative portfolio to songs, chamber music, concertos, symphonies, oratorios and even opera.
No dreamer, there was something deeply practical about his aspirations. “Once I was indifferent whether people cared for me or not”, he admitted in 1842, “but when a man has a wife and children, it’s another affair. Then he has to think of the future – wants to see the fruits of his labours, not the artistic, but the prosaic, matter-of-fact fruits, which can be brought and increased only by fame.”
His reputation as a composer was burgeoning – “I see with joy that the world’s interest in my [compositional] efforts is increasing rapidly” he could write optimistically – and he was good friends with many leading lights of his generation, including Felix Mendelssohn, Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner. Furthermore, in his wife Clara he had a piano playing sensation capable of earning as much from a three-week concert tour as he could earn in a year, thus lifting a certain financial burden from his shoulders. To the outer world, it looked like a calm sea and prosperous voyage for Robert Schumann.
But privately it was a very different story. Schumann’s inner world – once so vivid and inspirational in his youth – was slowly beginning to turn against him. Increasingly afflicted with anxiety and depression, his doctors advised him to find a hobby, something that wasn’t music, but music was his life. With no obvious means of a cure, his worsening bouts of ill-health could leave him completely debilitated for weeks on end. And yet when his strength did revive, he could still manage to compose with astonishing speed and assurance.
His prolific creativity was never more evident than in the early years of his marriage. In 1840, his own personal Liederjahr (Year of Song), he wrote no less than 138 lieder, the single greatest burst of songwriting since the days of Schubert. In 1841, having previously written virtually nothing for orchestra, he turned out two symphonies, sketched a third, composed an orchestral Overture, Scherzo and Finale, and for good measure added a superb Fantasia in A Minor for piano and orchestra, which he would later develop into a full concerto. “I often feel tempted to crush my piano”, he admitted at the time, “it’s too narrow for my thoughts.”
In 1842 came a sparkling year of chamber music: three full-scale string quartets, a piano quintet (one of his finest works), a piano quartet, plus a set of Fantasies (op 88) for Piano Trio. There were also more songs. In 1843, he turned out his first oratorio, Das Paradies und die Peri, and began planning a second on the subject of Goethe’s Faust. He had already jotted down preliminary ideas for an opera.
The only problem with such a full-on working routine was Schumann’s chronic inability to ever pace himself, or factor in his obvious frailties. Each major new piece that he completed would be followed by a period of illness and even nervous collapse.
The first significant breakdown in his health occurred in the autumn of 1844, shortly after he had accompanied Clara on a strenuous six-month concert tour of Russia. Schumann had been deeply ambivalent about making the trip beforehand, ominously telling a friend: “I had to promise the journey to St Petersburg to Clara in the most solemn manner, else she said she would go alone. I believe she would have been capable of it, in her anxiety for our external welfare. Pardon me if I forebear to tell how unwilling I am to leave my quiet home. I never think of it without the utmost sorrow, and dare not let Clara know my feelings.” But Robert also had a deep reliance on Clara for emotional and psychological support and he hated to be without her.
Where the Russian tour was an exciting adventure for the 25-year-old Clara, to Robert it was almost beyond endurance. The long journeys by primitive transport exhausted him, while at the concerts themselves he felt like a spare part. He would spend countless evenings watching praise being heaped upon his wife, before someone might politely ask him “whether he was a musician too”. At one reception, Schumann was observed sitting “mostly in a corner near the piano…with a sunken head, his hair was hanging in his face, he had a pensive expression, as if he were about to whistle to himself…” Mixed in with his general depression was a genuine ambivalence over his wife’s success. As much as Robert appreciated and encouraged her creative gifts, there was still a measure of cultural chauvinism he could never quite overcome. And although it may have seemed absurd even to him, he often found it humiliating to be usurped by her in public.
Back in Leipzig, he tried to put the whole sorry trip behind him by working on his second oratorio, Scenes from Goethe’s Faust. He and Clara had already agreed on moving from Leipzig to Dresden that summer (where Clara’s father also lived), believing that a calmer, more provincial city would be beneficial for his health. It was also at this time that he finally gave up editing (and writing for) Die Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, the music journal he had co-founded a decade earlier.
But with their bank balance flourishing from the proceeds of Clara’s tour, Schumann might have benefitted more from a holiday. Having completed an important section of Faust, his health then crashed dramatically, as one of his doctors later relayed in painstaking and agonizing detail:
Robert Schumann came to Dresden in October 1844, and laboured so unceasingly on the music for the epilogue to Goethe’s ‘Faust’ that, on completing it, he fell into a very morbid condition, manifested by the following symptoms: As soon as he began to use his brain, shivering, faintness, and cold feet set in, together with great pain and a peculiar fear of death; which took the form of a dread of high hills or houses, all metallic substances (even keys), medicine, and infection. He suffered much from loss of sleep, and felt worse at dawn than any other time. As he studied every prescription until he found some reason for not taking it, I ordered him cold plunge-baths, which so far improved his health that he was able to return to his usual (only) occupation, composition. As I had made a study of similar cases, especially among men who worked immoderately at one thing (for instance, accounts, &c), I was led to advise that he should employ himself and distract his mind was something else than music. His first chose natural history, then natural philosophy, &c, but abandoned them after a few days, and gave himself up, whatever he might be, to his musical thoughts.
Schumann’s health would never quite be the same again, and for the next decade he would alternate intervals of remission with long periods of painful, debilitating symptoms. One friend remembered meeting Schumann at the time and finding him “very ill, his nerves being so shattered by labour that I was much concerned for his life.” Schumann himself complained that his condition could have a destructive effect on his creativity, recalling that during a particularly bad period, “I lost every melody. As soon as I conceived it, my mental ear was overstrained.”*
* Schumann’s illness, which would eventually cause his premature death twelve years later, is still a topic for heated medical speculation today. Its possible causes have been variously attributed to neurosyphilis (likeliest), but also to schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or even to a brain tumour, which was discovered after his death.
Yet he was just as prone to surges of great revival and recovery. Despite his astonishing productivity in the early 1840s, the most prolific year of his career would come as late as 1849, when he turned out no less than 27 completed works, including piano music, chamber pieces, part-songs, lieder, choral works, concertante show-pieces, a miniature requiem and his deeply underrated Overture and Incidental Music to Byron’s Manfred (“I never devoted myself to any composition with such lavish love and power as ‘Manfred’” he said of the work).
Although composed the following year, the Third Symphony in E Flat Major (nicknamed the “Rhenish”) very much belongs to the heady tailwind of this late creative surge. It came about after a new job opportunity had taken Robert and Clara out of their native Saxony for the first time and to the city of Düsseldorf in the Rhineland. Having already celebrated their arrival there by composing a ‘cello concerto in two weeks, Schumann quickly followed up with a new symphony, inspired by the surrounding landscapes, and not least the majestic river running through Düsseldorf southwards to Cologne and from there to Bonn – the Rhine.
Despite the recent trials with his health, the symphony has a surprisingly robust and varied emotional language. It can shift from the visionary and heroic to tranquil and serene, from the solemn and dramatic towards introspection and genuine melancholy. Such contrasts suggest the many sides to Schumann’s personality, and not least the two artistic alter-egos he had created of himself in the early 1830s – dreamy Eusebius and dynamic Florestan.
Having originally intended to write a programmatic symphony, Schumann eventually did away with almost all the extra-musical references, having conceded that “if the eye is once directed to a certain point, the ear can no longer judge independently.” To an extent the music already speaks eloquently enough through its directness and expressive warmth.
The dramatic, magisterial side to the symphony is immediately evident in the extraordinary theme which opens the work, whose surging syncopations suggest a time signature alternating 3/4 with 3/2 (in reality it is all in 3/4, though with many notes tied across bar-lines). This theme dominates and powers the movement (marked Lebhaft – lively), giving it a terrific impetus that is rarely allowed to flag.
After such an explosive opening, the next two movements (respectively marked sehr mäßig – very moderate and nicht schnell – not fast) offer welcome respite: both are gentle serenades, full of pleasant, tuneful melodies, though with just a little poignant tension detectable under the surface. According to Schumann’s original, later excised title, the second movement was supposed to depict a pleasant morning cruise along the Rhine.
The fourth movement, by contrast, contains some of the most striking music of the entire symphony. Schumann initially marked the movement “in the character of an accompaniment to a solemn ceremony” before later crossing this out and leaving just the word “solemn”. As he was going through a brief obsession with Cologne Cathedral at the time (including making several pilgrimages to the great medieval edifice) it is often assumed that the ceremony suggested by this movement takes place in the cathedral itself.
With its minor-key solemnity, neo-Baroque echoes of Bach and Palestrina, labyrinthine polyphony and monolithic-seeming harmonies, the music appears to evoke its own lofty, awe-inspiring architecture to great effect. Another striking feature is the appearance of trombones (still associated at the time with ceremonial or funereal music) for the first time in the entire symphony, and with an important role to play. Finally, there is the unusually spacious-sounding orchestral scoring (by Schumann’s own standards) bringing to mind a large acoustical space, rather than the relative confinement of a municipal concert hall.
Immediately dispelling the gloomy seriousness of the “cathedral” movement, the spirited finale (once more Lebhaft) plunges us back into a sunny, pastoral world, full of energy, playfulness and general high spirits. Towards the end, a fanfare-like motif from the fourth movement makes a re-appearance, though now in a more triumphal vein, before the symphony ends in a brilliant blaze of glory.
It is often forgotten that the Rhenish was actually the last symphony Schumann wrote (his Fourth Symphony having been largely composed in 1841). It remains a glorious snapshot of one of the happier periods of his life, while conveying little sense of the looming precipices ahead.
Despite his shaky health, Schumann still had two burning aspirations in these later years. One was to write a nationalistic opera in the spirit of Carl Maria von Weber. The other was to take on a musical directorship in one of the great German cities, rather like his friend Felix Mendelssohn had done in Leipzig.
The operatic project came first. He had already told a friend, “so 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.” During his years in Dresden, he had struck up a friendship with a certain musical neighbour named Richard Wagner. The two would often discuss operatic topics and exchange ideas, while Schumann had already filled a notebook with possible operatic subjects, all based upon German medieval folklore, including Lohengrin, Nibelungen and Till Eulenspiegel*. He had also signaled his intention to get rid of recitatives in opera, which he thought interrupted the musical flow too much.
*Wagner would eventually use the first two in his operas Lohengrin and his epic, four-opera Ring of Nibelungen cycle. Till Eulenspiegel would become the subject of a famous Richard Strauss tone poem half a century later.
It is delicious to speculate how much influence Schumann might have had on Wagner, not least with the latter still at a formative stage of his career. And yet when the two men eventually got down to work on their respective projects, there could only be one winner. While Wagner took his cue from Schumann’s notebook and produced his masterly Lohengrin in 1848, Schumann would compose what would turn out to be his only opera – Genoveva – a work strikingly Wagnerian in conception if not quite in execution. Despite containing much beautiful and lyrical material, Genoveva‘s creator would ultimately lack the instinct for dramatic rhetoric that his Dresden neighbour had in abundance. Performed only a handful of times in Leipzig two years later, Genoveva would be both a critical and commercial failure.
Schumann’s attempts to find a prestigious official position within the musical world were hardly more successful. He had already managed an unconvincing stint at Felix Mendelssohn’s newly opened music academy in Leipzig a few years earlier. Despite his talent and reputation, Schumann was a mediocre teacher, often imparting next to no information during a lesson – although for some pupils his very presence was instructional enough.
Eventually in 1850, and after briefly flirting with a possible opening at the Vienna music conservatory, Schumann landed the one and only really steady job he ever had – as Düsseldorf’s director of music. Although the city’s residents were initially honoured to have him, things began to quickly unravel once it became apparent that being able to write symphonies did not necessarily equate to being able to wave a baton effectively. As before, Schumann was poor at conveying his wishes. Nor was he exactly a dynamo at the conducting podium, mumbling instructions which his players struggled to hear, while his flagging energy levels necessitated him taking frequent breaks in the middle of rehearsals, something that left his musicians bored and frustrated.
He struggled on as best he could for three years. Colleagues were mystified at the increasingly slow speeds he adopted for performances, while Schumann himself realised that his brain could no longer keep up with faster tempi. Leaves of absence due to illness became more and more common, until finally his employment was terminated, by mutual consent, in 1853.
Still he composed furiously in his spare time, or at least for as long as his mind and body allowed. His late works have long been a bone of contention among musicologists: for much of the twentieth century it was fashionable to disparage their unusual novelties or innovations as manifestations of Schumann’s mental and creative decline.
Such a perception probably goes back to Clara Schumann, the official keeper (and to an extent dissembler) of her husband’s music in the forty years after his death. Clara was so spooked by some of Robert’s later compositions, that some she suppressed (including his 1853 Violin Concerto), while others she threw on the fire. It was if they stirred memories in her still too painful to process.
It is only in recent decades that music listeners have started to overcome their squeamishness towards post-1850 Schumann, having put his enduring originality into its proper perspective, while recognizing a mind just as fascinated as ever by the challenge of solving musical problems. Good examples are the Third Piano Trio, the Second Violin Sonata (both from 1851) and the Gesänge der Frühe (Songs of Dawn) for solo piano (1853). The creator of Papillons and Davidsbündlertänze is still very recognizable in these resilient and inventive late works, even if at times he could challenge his oldest and most faithful admirers. “Very original as always”, Clara would write of the Gesänge, “but hard to understand, their tone is so very strange.”
Another quality to Robert Schumann that remained entirely undiminished was his inherently generous nature. When a callow young stranger turned up at his door one autumn day in 1853, with an introduction from a mutual friend, Robert warmly invited him in and asked him to play some of his compositions on the piano. Before the young man had proceeded very far, Robert momentarily stopped him – “please wait a moment, I must call my wife”, he told him. Husband and wife then listened in increasing admiration to their impromptu visitor. “Sitting at the piano, he began to explore most wonderful regions”, Schumann recalled of the encounter. “We were drawn into more and more magical circles by his playing, full of genius, which made of the piano and orchestra of lamenting and jubilant voices. There were sonatas, or rather veiled symphonies; songs whose poetry might be understood without words; piano pieces both of a demoniac nature and of the most graceful form…” In this way, the 20-year-old Johannes Brahms would make a stunning first impression on the Schumanns, immediately becoming their more or less unofficial house guest.
Brahms would never forget Robert Schumann’s kindness towards a young and still entirely unknown musician, even as his own personal acquaintance with the older man would be tragically brief. Robert was slowly losing his grip, suffering more and more from visual and auditory hallucinations. He now believed he was in close contact with the spirit world, and one night in mid-February 1854, he awoke Clara to inform her that the ghosts of Schubert and Mendelssohn had appeared and were dictating to him a beautiful melody. Schumann was desperate to get to the piano to write it down; shortly afterwards he would begin a set of variations on the theme which eventually became known as his Geistervariationen (Ghost Variations).*
*Although Schumann seemed entirely unaware that the ghostly theme was in fact his own, and one he had already used in the slow movement of his Violin Concerto.
He was by now in a near-psychotic state, telling Clara that he feared he was no longer in control of his mind and might harm her in a fit of insanity. A few days later, he was entertaining two friends at home in his dressing gown and slippers, when he slipped out of his house unnoticed, and towards the centre of Düsseldorf. Walking to the half-way point of a central bridge, he climbed a small ledge before throwing himself into the icy Rhine. Even as several fishermen bravely swam out to rescue him, Schumann furiously tried to fight them off.
Clara was advised by a doctor to take lodgings away from her – now evidently insane – husband. Briefly back home after surviving his suicide attempt, Robert just had time to complete his ghost-inspired variations, before leaving a dedication to his wife on the manuscript. Although a now sometimes derided work and seldom performed, the Geistervariationen is, in spite of some unusual elements, still authentic Schumann, and its serene, distinctly otherworldly mood seems like nothing less than a tender farewell.
Shortly afterwards, Schumann agreed to be committed to an asylum in Endenich, just outside of Bonn. There he lived out the short remainder of his life, though without ever recovering his mental balance. He was visited often by Brahms and sometimes by other friends, but never by Clara who was cruelly forbidden to see him (or even send letters): the doctors feared her presence might cause their patient unnecessary distress.
She was only allowed to come and see him after two and a half years had passed, at which point Robert was on the brink of death. Although the latter had since lost the power of speech, he still appeared to recognize his wife with pleasure. Clara admitted she would not have swapped that moment for anything in the world. And after he had finally slipped away, even as she grieved him, she could only feel a certain relief that his suffering was over:
His head was beautiful in death, the forehead so transparent and gently rounded. I stood at the body of my dearly loved husband and was calm; all my feelings were of thankfulness to God that he was finally free, and as I knelt at his bed I had such a holy feeling. It was as if his magnificent spirit hovered above me, oh – if he had only taken me with him! I saw him today for the last time – I placed some flowers on his brow – he has taken my love with him.
Clara never remarried. Ever practical and resourceful, she worked hard to raise her seven children, while providing them a reasonable livelihood from her playing. Her concert tours continued to draw in large, enthusiastic audiences, and she travelled extensively all over Europe, more often than not with a selection of her husband’s piano works in her music case.
Although fourteen years her junior, Johannes Brahms would become one of her closest friends in the years ahead, offering unstinting emotional and professional support, even if always from a slight distance (Brahms would eventually settle in Vienna). In turn, Clara would gently critique every new composition he sent her, while growing to love his music almost as much as her husband’s. She would look on with a certain pride as the younger man’s career went from strength to strength.
Both Clara and Brahms would do much over the decades to promote and popularize her late husband’s music, as well as prepare new editions of his work. And although Brahms would very much find his own distinctive style, his output is nonetheless full of veiled references to Schumann’s music. When he came to write his own Third Symphony, thirty-three years after the Rhenish Symphony, he would actually quote a brief, passing theme from the former – and not just quote it, but use it as one of the principal ideas underpinning his own work.