Schumann: The Faces and the Masks by Judith Chernaik
STEPHEN WALSH Schumann: The Faces and the Masks By Judith Chernaik Faber £20 Oldie price £14.26 inc p&p
Robert Schumann has always been a favourite composer of the literary set, and there are good reasons why. He was probably the first great composer, beating Wagner by a short head, to emerge from a non-musical background: books and publishing in his case; theatre in Wagner’s. Until his late teens he seemed as likely to turn into a writer as a musician.
Though a gifted pianist, he had little theoretical training in music till he was 21, and although he had composed music before that, he had also written poetry and plays, and his early music, nearly all for piano, reflects his literary tendencies, borrowing characters from German Romantics such as Jean Paul and Hoffmann, and inventing musical portraits of people he knew or knew about.
Judith Chernaik herself is best known as co-founder of Poems on the Underground, and she is the author of several novels. But her Schumann book shows that she is also no mug when it comes to music. The book is a biography and, as narrative, a very good one; but it also devotes plenty of space to the music, recognising that a great composer’s life – however many women he may seduce, and however mad he may eventually go (probably as a consequence, in Schumann’s case) – can only ever
really be explained in terms of the music he wrote.
Chernaik’s musical discussion is designedly non-technical; there are no music examples, and not much close reading. Rather, she adopts a descriptive approach; a sensitive, well-informed one which keeps the reader posted on the significance of this or that work and the way it interlocks with the composer’s life.
What it doesn’t perhaps do is locate the significance in aesthetic terms. We hear about Schumann’s originality but never learn exactly what it consists of, and she sometimes seems puzzled by it herself, as in the first song of Dichterliebe, which she says ‘opens with a strange dissonant piano prelude’ (the dissonances aren’t particularly strange; what is strange is the way the singer comes in in the ‘wrong’ key, and the way the song ends on an unresolved discord).
In the main, Chernaik describes the music as she describes the life: in narrative form with relevant asides but a strong thread. She knows and loves the music, has it open in front of her, and talks about it with engaging enthusiasm and dependable judgement. Perhaps she is too reluctant to insist on her own opinion, tending to invoke mysterious groups in support of views that are evidently her own: ‘for some listeners’; ‘for many listeners’; ‘recent studies suggest that’.
Luckily, they all seem to talk sense. Schumann was a great original whose piano music and songs broke new ground, whose symphonies are underrated masterpieces, and whose late works are by no means all the dying products of a diseased mind.
Sound on the music, the book is superb on the life. This is the most readable and penetrating biography of this wonderful composer whose life touches modern sensibilities at so many points. Chernaik has read Schumann’s Tagebücher, the diaries that are like an X-ray of the young adult mind; with all their romantic yearnings, sexual guilt, half-baked philosophising, literary passions and aspirations. And like the novelist she is, she knows how to synthesise this material into a vivid, sympathetic portrait of emerging genius.
She even makes discoveries. She reveals, for the first time in a lay study, the identity of the servant girl, Christiane Apitzsch, with whom Schumann had an on-off affair in the early 1830s and to whom he first confessed his ‘wound’ – the syphilitic infection that would eventually destroy his mind. She mentions, but is not enthusiastic about, the modern theory of Schumann’s bipolarity, which may, after all, have poisoned his existence and affected his work but surely wasn’t the cause of his final illness.
Above all, she is excellent in the two crucial areas of his domestic life – his troubled engagement and relatively untroubled marriage to the pianist Clara Wieck; and the whole saga of his mental collapse in 1854 and his death, two years later, in the asylum at Endenich.
Much of this is well-travelled biography, but Chernaik enlivens it with forensic detail that one might expect to be tedious, but is riveting. Her portrayal of the dispute with Clara’s father (Schumann’s old piano teacher) over their engagement, and especially her richly researched account of his confinement in Endenich and the dubious theories of its director, Dr Richarz, who refused Clara access to her husband until the day before he died… these are all the more moving for the cool clarity with which they are told.