The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
How to find the sublime, indoors
Schumann’s genius was to show that romanticism did not have to be about stormy drama, says Ivan Hewett
Music is the most romantic of all the arts, said ETA Hoffmann, because it deals only with the spirit world. Robert Schumann would have agreed with him. “For me, music is always the language which permits me to converse with the Beyond,” he wrote in Advice to Young Musicians of 1848. When in old age he was visited by the “young eagle” Johannes Brahms, he praised the budding composer’s piano music in echt romantic terms, adding,
“If he were to wave his magic wand over the massed powers of the chorus and orchestra, still more wonderful glimpses into the mysteries of the spiritual world will be revealed to us.”
With a world-view like that, you might imagine Schumann had led a properly romantic life, loftily indifferent to practicality, always off on exotic travels and pursuing liaisons with titled women. In fact, as Judith Chernaik’s new biography makes clear, his life was quite humdrum. Anyone looking for grand gestures like the ones Berlioz describes in his wonderful Memoirs (such as “collapsing in tears over the kettledrums” after a stressful premiere) or a whiff of the scandal that clung to Franz Liszt, roaming around with a married countess, will be disappointed.
The most exciting thing in Schumann’s life was perhaps a trip to Russia, where he accompanied his famous piano-playing wife Clara on tour. Typically he didn’t enjoy it. Taciturn and shy as ever, he stood in a corner at receptions thrown for Clara, smoking his favourite cigars, resentful of the fact everyone thought of him as Clara’s husband rather than a composer of genius and editor of a music journal that championed romanticism against the
Philistines. No doubt he wished he was at home in cosy Leipzig, where he would visit his favourite inn for one beer every day, noting down the expense in a cashbook.
Not much evidence of the “infinite spirit world” there. But it’s part of Schumann’s special genius, to show that romanticism in music doesn’t have to be about a witches’ sabbath or a storm in the Alps. It can be rooted in small, everyday things. Although he expressed the conventional romantic love of nature, he was essentially an indoors composer. His best-loved piano pieces evoke the blissful domesticity of middle-class family life, seen often from a child’s point of view. As Stravinsky pointed out, Schumann is the composer of childhood par excellence, because as well as summoning the world of childhood, these pieces are such perfect introductions to playing the piano for small hands.
Cheek-by-jowl with such pieces are others that express the darker side of childhood, the fear of hobgoblins, and of loss. And yet in a strange way these darker pieces don’t banish the intimacy, they intensify it. This fact brings us close to Schumann’s special gift, which is his ability to give intimacy itself an aspect of the infinite. The romantic ardour in his immortal song-cycles such as Dichterliebe (A Poet’s Love) and Frauen-Liebe und Leben (A Woman’s Love and Life) is every bit as powerful as the love-scenes in Berlioz’s Trojans or Wagner’s Tristan; the difference is that Schumann expresses it in miniature form, in a mood of pure tenderness or regret.
Chernaik is keenly aware of all this. Unlike John Worthen in his 2007 Schumann: The Life and
Death of a Musician, the most recent English-language
349pp, Faber, £20, ebook £14.99
biography, Chernaik actually pays close attention to the music, and summons its inimitable combination of romantic ardour, eccentricity and classical craftsmanship in deft prose. She makes an eloquent case for the value of Schumann’s later music, still neglected in performance, particularly the dramatic oratorios like The Paradise and the Peri, and the genre-breaking fairy stories told in prose and music, such as Fair Hedwig.
The one thing she underplays is the sheer strangeness of his music, the way he allows the narrative of his radical early piano pieces like Kreisleriana to be disrupted by foreign elements. Schumann gives these momentary invasions an extraordinary feeling of coming from the past. They exist in perfect isolation, self-contained and yet enigmatic, and that gives them a feeling of being a memory, even though we’ve never heard them before. It’s a remarkable effect, and absolutely unprecedented.
One might hazard a guess that the composer of such weirdly self-disrupting music might be prone to dreams and fantasies, and perhaps not entirely stable – which was of course the case. If people know anything about Schumann, it is that he tried to drown himself in the Rhine, and spent the remaining few years of his life in an asylum.
The publication of the asylum director’s case notes in 2006 proved pretty conclusively that “general paralysis of the insane”, the tertiary stage of syphilis, which he contracted in his promiscuous youth, was responsible for the terrible suffering of his last years. But Chernaik doesn’t rule out the possibility that Schumann’s mental state was always fragile. On the evidence of her biography, he was clearly a compulsive fantasist, in love with the stock characters of the commedia dell’arte and the masked revellers of carnivals.
He lived in a world of imaginary characters, some of whom became real enough to him to be named as authors of articles in the magazine he founded. The two most famous – the forcefully romantic “male” Florestan and dreamy “feminine” Eusebius – were portrayed musically in a number of his piano pieces (thus the “Faces and Masks” of Chernaik’s title).
Schumann was aware of his propensity to morbid imaginings, and seem to have had uncanny premonitions of his fate. He almost called off a proposed move to Düsseldorf with Clara when he discovered there was a mental asylum in the town. As he put it, “I am obliged to avoid carefully all melancholy impressions of the kind. And if we musicians live so often on sunny heights, the sadness of reality cuts all the deeper when it lies naked before our eyes. At least so it is with me and my vivid imagination.”
Perhaps because Schumann’s real sufferings were so dreadful, and his imaginary ones hardly less so, Chernaik passes over his faults without comment. Schumann was aware of his dark side, what he called the “slime” of his powerful sexual instincts and fondness for drink, but only because of the threat those things posed to the purity of his own soul, not because of the harm they might cause to others.
When he got a servant girl in the house of Clara’s father pregnant, he didn’t lift a finger to support the infant, who was packed off to the woman’s parents. His youthful affair with Ernestine von Fricken seemed serious for a while, but Chernaik tells us that his “passion for Ernestine cooled when he discovered she was neither noble nor rich”. Chernaik doesn’t want us to conclude that there was a cold, self-centred man inside the romantic dreamer, but it’s hard to resist that impression.
Still, Schumann could be generous to people he thought deserved it, such as his friends the composers Felix Mendelssohn, Niels Gade and the young Brahms, and of course his adored wife Clara. As with many composers, the best of the man went into the music. As Chernaik is keen to stress, Schumann may have poured music out unstintingly in the white heat of inspiration, but he had a craftsman’s respect for tradition, and was constantly striving to perfect his gifts.
“Honour what is old, but bring a warm heart to what is new… study is unending,” he remarked in his Advice to Young Musicians. The soul that could utter those sentiments must have been a noble one, whatever its faults, and in this affecting and moving biography Chernaik brings it vividly to life.
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