Passion and pain of a piano maestro
Schumann wrote some of the world’s most romantic music, despite a life dogged by madness, tragedy and syphilis . . .
SCHUMANN: THE FACES AND THE MASKS by Judith Chernaik (Faber £20, 368pp) YSENDA MAXTONE GRAHAM
DO COMPOSERS need to suffer so that they can pour bucketloads of anguish into their music and thus help future generations plumb the depths of their own emotions? Reading this harrowing biography of the composer Robert Schumann, I felt that God himself was saying to the poor boy at birth: ‘I’ve brought you into the world to suffer, Robert, in order that others might be helped and healed by your music.
‘I will give you a strong melancholic and depressive streak and I will ensure that you are forcibly separated from the woman you love for years on end, so you can call to her, endlessly, poignantly, helplessly, in your wonderful, powerful music.
‘You will eventually be allowed to marry her and will enjoy some brief contentment.
‘But you’ll be spending the last two-and-ahalf years of your life alone in an asylum, cut off from your remembered happiness, going madder and madder until you die.’
It’s a most touching and moving story, beautifully told by Judith Chernaik, the woman who first came up with the inspired idea of Poems On The Underground.
She understands the poetry of Schumann’s soul and she communicates with quiet urgency the pity of his story and the beauty of his music. If her intention was that by reading this, we’d be inspired to go back to his music with a deeper appreciation, it has worked for me.
‘And one other thing,’ said God to Schumann. ‘You have the potential to be a great pianist but, in fact, you’re going to wreck your chances of that by wearing a contraption round your middle fingers — meant to strengthen the others during piano practice — but this will actually partially paralyse your middle fingers, making it impossible for you to be a pianist. You’ll have to be a composer instead.’
AS I read this engrossing book, I had to brace myself: how much worse can things get? The one abiding, cheering fact that makes everything else bearable is that Schumann did marry the love of his life, the woman of his dreams — the angelic, beautiful, famous and brilliant virtuoso pianist of her day, Clara Wieck.
The two lived a devoted married life and had seven surviving children, one of whom (Ludwig) would be incarcerated in an asylum for nearly 30 years and die there, blind, aged 50.
If Clara is the angel of this story — and she is, sacrificing her own potential career as an equally great composer by giving prestige concerts all over Europe to promote her husband’s music, and to earn the money to make it possible for him to compose more — then Clara’s father, Friedrich Wieck, is the villain. He’s absolutely vile.
Young Robert met this dreadful man when he went to Leipzig University in 1828, aged 18, to lodge with him as a piano pupil. Wieck’s daughter Clara was then nine and already a piano prodigy.
At first, Wieck was Schumann’s mentor, supporter and friend. Schumann did have an affair with a servant and may well have picked up syphilis from her or from other women with whom he had affairs during that time — but that was not the problem.
When Robert and Clara fell in love in 1835, and Robert asked Wieck for permission to marry her, Wieck was furious and disgusted.
As Chernaik puts it: ‘How dare a man of no consequence aspire to the hand of an artist who had already conquered Paris?’
In Wieck’s eyes, Schumann was nothing but a drunken, stuttering composer of incomprehensible compositions. Wieck wanted to marry his daughter off to a rich banker instead.
For 18 months, the couple were forcibly separated, and thus began a period of astonishing composing from Schumann, piano sonatas and fantasies in which (now that I know it) you can hear Schumann calling to Clara.
Then they had to endure another year apart, when Wieck insisted Clara must live with him and that if she had anything more to do with Schumann, he would disinherit her. Robert and Clara made a pact always to think of each other at nine o’clock every evening.
Even for a normally rational human being, such enforced separation would be hard to bear.
But Schumann was intoxicated by Romantic thoughts brought on by Schubert’s songs and Goethe’s poems: feelings of isolation and a banishment from happiness and the temptation to end one’s life. He pined and kept a diary, in which he wrote such things as: ‘This has been the most terrible day of my life.’ He poured out his soul into his music.
Even adults in those days could not marry without the permission of the bride’s father. Robert and Clara managed to go over Wieck’s head to the Court of Appeals, who did, eventually, give permission for them to marry. Wieck was sent to prison for defamation of Schumann’s character — but he was locked up for only 18 days.
Please be happy now, I begged — and they were, sort of, except that they found any separation unbearable and Clara still needed to travel Europe for concerts.
Schumann suffered a nervous collapse four years into their marriage, which led to ‘an assault of terrible thoughts, bringing me to the edge of despair’, he wrote.
Then he took an ill-advised post as a music director in Dusseldorf. He was totally unsuited to directing a large crowd of amateur music-makers and the burghers of the city couldn’t stand him — nor he them.
HIS undying passion for Clara gave his music exuberance and joy, which counteracted the melancholy and despair. It’s the intermingling of the emotions, suggests Chernaik, that makes the music speak to us so deeply.
What was it that caused his final illness, his piteous, slow descent to death at the age of 46 from madness and paralysis?
On one occasion in 1854, he got up in the middle of the night, scribbled down a musical theme ‘that the angel had sung to him’, left the marital home in his dressing gown and slippers, walked to the Rhine, threw his wedding ring into it — and then threw himself in, too.
He was rescued by boatmen and taken to a private asylum near Bonn, where — shockingly, it seems now — he was not allowed visits from his wife, as his doctor thought this would cause him too much agitation.
Clara only saw him in 1856, at his deathbed, by which time he could only mumble ‘My...’ and not get as far as ‘My Clara.’
Schumann’s medical notes came to light in 1988. The cause of death is thought to be tertiary syphilis, with its common manifestation, ‘general paralysis of the insane’, or GPI.
Clara lived on for another 40 years and was the muse for another of our greatest composers, Johannes Brahms. Clara, we thank you.