Part 1

HERBERT F. PEYSER

Robert Schumann Tone-Poet Prophet and Critic

Written for and dedicated to the RADIO MEMBERS of THE PHILHARMONIC-SYMPHONY SOCIETY of NEW YORK

Copyright 1948 THE PHILHARMONIC-SYMPHONY SOCIETY of NEW YORK 113 West 57th Street New York 19, N. Y.

FOREWORD

It is obviously impossible in the brief space of the present booklet to offer more than the sketchiest outline of Robert Schumann’s short life but amazingly rich achievement. Together with Haydn and Schubert he was, perhaps, the most completely lovable of the great masters. It is hard, moreover, to think of a composer more strategically placed in his epoch or more perfectly timed in his coming. Tone poet, fantast, critic, visionary, prophet—he was all of these! And he passed through every phase, it seemed, of romantic experience. The great and even the semi-great of a fabulous period of music were his intimates—personages like Mendelssohn, Chopin, Liszt, Moscheles, Ferdinand David, Hiller, Joachim, Brahms. He won the woman he loved after a bitter struggle against a tyrannical father-in-law. He created much of the world’s greatest piano music, many of its loveliest songs, four great symphonies, superb chamber compositions and a good deal else which, even today, is insufficiently known or valued. A poetic critic, if ever there was one, he proclaimed to a world, still indifferent or uncertain, the greatness of a Chopin and a Brahms. His physical and mental decline was a tragedy even more poignant than Beethoven’s deafness or the madness of Hugo Wolf. His life story is, in point of fact, vastly more complex and many-sided than the following handful of unpretentious and unoriginal pages suggest. These will have served their purpose if they induce the reader to familiarize himself more fully with the colorful and endlessly romantic pattern of Schumann’s vivid life and grand accomplishment.

H. F. P.

ROBERT SCHUMANN _Tone-Poet Prophet and Critic_

_By_ HERBERT F. PEYSER

At 9:30 on the evening of June 8, 1810, (the same being Saint Medard’s Day), the book publisher August Schumann and his wife Johanne Christiane, living in the Haus am Markt No. 5, Zwickau, Saxony, became the parents of a boy whom they determined to call Medardus, in honor of the saint of the occasion. Reasonably well to do if not precisely affluent they were pleased at the idea of another addition to their little brood of three boys and a girl—Eduard, Karl, Julius and Emilie, respectively. Over night they seem to have thought better of saddling the newcomer with such a name as Medardus and six days later the infant was carried to the local Church of Saint Mary’s there to be christened Robert Alexander. In proper season the “Alexander” seems for all practical purposes to have vanished.

August Schumann had not always dwelt on easy street. Born in 1773 in the village of Entschütz, near Gera, he was the son of an impecunious country pastor who, despite his poverty, became a cleric of some eminence. Unwilling to see the youngster grow up as an object of charity the preacher gave him four years of high school education, then apprenticed him to a merchant. But the lad was not cut out for business; books were his world and in them he sought refuge from the misery of shopkeeping. Moreover, he soon developed literary aspirations of his own and, even though a well-meaning book-seller tried to discourage him, wrote a novel entitled “Scenes of Knighthood and Monkish Legends”. The unremitting labor of study, writing and business chores told on his health and for the rest of his life he was never wholly a well man. Yet nothing could diminish his energies or dampen his ambitions to achieve the glories of authorship. When he eventually fell in love with a daughter of one Schnabel, official surgeon of the town of Zeitz, and met with a downright refusal from that hard-shelled individual to give his daughter to anyone but a merchant of independent means, August Schumann was equal to the challenge. For a year and a half he wrote day and night, saved up about $750 (a respectable sum at the time) opened a shop in partnership with a friend in the town of Ronneberg, married Schnabel’s daughter and was happy. A circulating library formed an adjunct to the store and the new Mrs. Schumann divided her time between handling books and selling goods. Her husband for his part combined the satisfactions of an extremely prolific authorship with the management of a bookshop, not to mention the direction of a prosperous business. In 1808 he moved to Zwickau where he founded the publishing house of Schumann Brothers, which lasted till 1840. The firm brought out among other things translations of the works of Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron. One of its showpieces was a so-called “Picture Gallery of the Most Famous Men of all Nations and Ages”. At 14 Robert busily puttered around the place, reading proofs and performing many of the other odd jobs common to printing establishments.

For all his zeal and strength of character August Schumann paid the price of his unsparing toil in the shape of a nervous malady complicated by other ailments and attended by accesses of profound melancholy. He died on Aug. 10, 1826. His children without exception inherited the diseased strain. Curiously enough, about the only quality Robert could not regard as an outright heritage was his musical talent. His father had none of it and his mother only the most superficial trace. She was an excellent housewife and a tender soul but of wholly provincial mentality (which explains, perhaps, why her restlessly active husband chose her as his mate). Robert looked like his mother and loved her devotedly. But his features were about the sole birthright he owed her. From his father, on the other hand, he acquired virtually all of those qualities which were to fertilize his greatest inspirations—ambition, high principle, productive activity, imagination, poetic fantasy, whimsicality, the gift of literary expression and even to a certain degree that shrewd practical sense which marked some of his business dealings. Yet to none of his immediate forbears does he seem to have been indebted for his musical instincts as such.

Robert’s early upbringing was chiefly the business of his mother. His father, swamped by literary and mercantile pursuits, had no time for nursery duties. Possibly the child would have been less spoiled if a paternal hand had more actively guided him. As it was, Robert became not only his mother’s darling but the pet of every woman of her large acquaintance. He had his way in everything and in later years this error of his early training was reflected in the irritation he sometimes showed when crossed in his wishes. All the same, this female adulation did not soften the lad who, at the age of six, was sent to the private school run by an Archdeacon Döhner. In the games and sports of his comrades he was as wild and turbulent as the roughest of them. Nevertheless, he did not neglect his school work and exhibited a lively intelligence. Music fascinated him early. A pupil from a Latin school, one August Vollert, who obtained free board at the Schumann home in exchange for a bit of teaching, gave Robert a little elementary instruction in the art, though hardly systematic guidance. The spark was kindled, however. At seven the boy composed a few little dances. We need not say “wrote”, for these trifles were chiefly improvised on the piano. One aspect of his gift manifested itself early—a knack for “characterizing” people in tone with a kind of delineative justness that both moved and amused listeners. The child was obviously father to the man who composed the “Carnival”!

In Zwickau at the time there was no better musician than Johann Gottfried Kuntzsch, who long before Robert was born, had gained a certain distinction by conducting a performance of Haydn’s “Creation”. August Schumann, who secretly hoped that his youngest boy might become such a poet as he himself had always aspired to be, resolved to cultivate that musical talent which was beginning to flower. It was to the care of Kuntzsch, therefore, that he confided him. We know little of the kind of teaching Robert enjoyed at this stage. Frederick Niecks surmises that it may have consisted “in little more than telling the pupil what to practise and the first elementary rules of fingering ... in short, prescription without exemplification, happy-go-lucky chance without purposeful system”. Niecks adds that Kuntzsch’s pupils could never be sure of escaping a box on the ear and that “on one occasion Robert’s bad timekeeping was even corrected by a stout blackthorn”. Yet Robert preserved a good opinion of Kuntzsch all his life and as late as 1832 wrote asking permission to dedicate a composition to “the only one who recognized the predominating musical talent in me and indicated betimes the path along which, sooner or later, my good genius was to guide me”.

In 1820 Robert entered the Zwickau Lyceum (“Gymnasium”) to emerge, eight years later, with a certificate inscribed with a flattering _eximie dignus_. He was a personable youngster, blond, bright-eyed, sensitive, temperamental, prankish. The two subjects particularly dear to his heart were music and literature. His teachers thought kindly of his talent for languages. An uncommonly developed instinct for rhythm and meter expressed itself in effusions of poetry. At home he spent much time concocting “robber comedies” and producing them with the assistance of his schoolmates. Meanwhile, he was carrying on his musical studies with the son of a local bandmaster. The two became fast friends, played overtures and symphonies in four hand arrangements and even tackled compositions by Hummel and Czerny. Kuntzsch was anything but pleased by his pupil’s displays of independence. Not having been consulted about the latter’s music-making he suddenly declared that Robert could now shift for himself. Yet when Kuntzsch produced an oratorio by F. Schneider at Saint Mary’s Church, young Schumann played the piano accompaniments while his father, though unmusical, beamed approvingly. Indeed, August Schumann did everything to further his son’s musical inclinations. The paternal publishing firm obtained gratis quantities of music from which Robert was free to take his pick and choice. Father Schumann provided plenty of music stands for household concerts and bought a Streicher piano. With some of his musical comrades Robert produced at home a setting of the 150th Psalm he had composed. A little earlier he had heard a concert by the celebrated Ignaz Moscheles on a trip to Karlsbad in his father’s company. For a long time he was fired with the ambition to study with this virtuoso. Nothing came of it but the youth preserved the program of that recital like a sacred relic.

Zwickau duly woke up to the accomplishments of the wonderchild in its midst. The more prominent citizens invited him to play at their homes. At the evening musicales of the “Gymnasium” he performed things like Moscheles’ Variations on the Alexander March and showpieces by Herz, much in vogue at the time. August, who had no use for half-baked artists, thought of placing his boy under Karl Maria von Weber. But just about this time Weber embarked on the journey to London from which he was never to return alive. One person who was more pleased than grieved by the mischance was Mother Schumann, who harbored an insurmountable dread of the “breadless profession” for her idolized boy. Never did she tire of describing its miseries, the better to scare him off. Why not adopt a lucrative profession? The law, for instance. And so, for the time being, Robert remained in Zwickau, obtaining, as he used to say later, “an ordinary high school training, studying music on the side and out of the fulness of his devotion”—but alone! In the broadest sense he was to grow up like his father—self-taught.

Adolescence subdued the wildness which had so often characterized the schoolboy. More and more Robert became a dreamer. He grew selective, too, in his choice of friends, of whom he had relatively few. One who stood closest to him was his sister-in-law, Therese, the wife of his brother Eduard. August Schumann, who had always hoped that this youngest son might inherit his own literary and poetic tastes, lived long enough to see the boy’s talents developing along these lines. Robert kept diaries, note books, memoranda for verses and similar jottings. He was scrupulously honest with himself; in one scrapbook, for instance, he made this entry after some rhymed lines: “It was my dear mother who composed this lovely and simple poem”. In another case he wrote: “By my father”, and elsewhere: “Not by me”. Once he made a timid effort to break into print and sent some of his effusions to Theodor Hell (otherwise Karl Winkler), of the Dresden _Abendzeitung_. He got them back.

A 17 he became acquainted with the writings of Jean Paul Richter, then at the peak of his romantic fame. Perhaps none of Robert’s youthful encounters influenced him so profoundly. Jean Paul colored in one fashion or another everything he was to write or compose for years to come. They were kindred souls—both the poet of lyric sentimentalisms, fantastic humors, moonlight raptures, dawns, twilights, tender ecstasies and other stage settings and properties of romanticism, and his ardent and sensitive young worshipper. But if more than any other Jean Paul fired Robert’s literary impulses it was Franz Schubert who lent wings to his musical fancy. His experience of Schubert began at the home of Dr. Ernst August Carus and his wife, Agnes, exceptionally cultured musical amateurs. Schubert was one of their particular enthusiasms and Robert, whom the couple quickly took to their hearts (they nicknamed him “Fridolin”, after a gentle page boy in one of Schiller’s ballads), played four hand compositions with Mrs. Carus, heard her sing Schubert songs and became familiar with a good deal of other music, including that of Spohr. Robert would not have been himself had he not come to look upon the worthy lady with a kind of exalted devotion. Soon we find him expressing the state of his feelings in his best (or worst!) Jean Paul manner: “I feel now for the first time the pure, the highest love, which does not for ever sip from the intoxicating cup of sensual pleasures, but finds its happiness only in tender contemplation and in reverence.... Were I a smile, I would hover round her eyes; were I joy, I would skip softly through her pulses; were I a tear I would weep with her; and if she then smiled again, I would gladly die on her eyelash and gladly—yes, gladly—be no more”.

* * *

Shortly after his father’s death he had suffered two cases of calf love—one for a person called Liddy, the other for a certain Nanni. First he found them “glorious maidens”, whom he longed to adore like the madonnas he felt sure they were. In the next moment they became “narrow-hearted souls”, ignorant of the Utopia in which he lived.

This Utopia, by the way, was bathed in champagne. All his life champagne was his favorite beverage, even as it was of his great contemporary, Richard Wagner, though like Wagner he would modulate now and then to beer or a glass of wine. Both masters craved their champagne whether they had the price of it or not. And Robert in his student days only too often “had not”. His biographer, Niecks, notes disapprovingly that Schumann’s “worst failing” was: “He had no sense of the value of money and found it impossible to square his allowance with his expenditures”. When his funds ran out he had a remedy for replenishing them. Again like Wagner, he seems to have been a virtuoso in the art of writing begging letters that generally brought results. If his mother, his brothers, his sisters-in-law, his crusty old guardian, Rudel, ever hesitated a threat of the pawn-shop or the money-lender was always efficacious. No wonder Christiane Schumann was frightened by the idea that her Robert might, for all her efforts, land in the “breadless profession”. Successful barristers might easily indulge their champagne tastes but certainly not musicians lacking even “beer pocketbooks”!

In Schneeberg, a town near Zwickau, Robert played publicly and with immense success a concerto movement by Kalkbrenner. Alone among his enthusiastic listeners his mother remained cool. Soon her wishes prevailed and, though both she and Rudel were aware of the youth’s “eternal soul struggle” between music and the law, Robert made a promise of a sort to embrace jurisprudence. And so, at Easter, 1828, we find him enrolled at the University of Leipzig as a “studiosus juris”. Scarcely arrived in Leipzig he struck up a warm friendship with another law student, Gisbert Rosen, who shared Robert’s poetic enthusiasms, particularly his devotion to Jean Paul. Rosen was on the point of removing to Heidelberg to continue his legal studies and Schumann quickly formed a plan to accompany his friend on his journey, with a few stopovers on the way. After a short visit to Zwickau the two made a pilgrimage to Bayreuth, where Jean Paul’s widow still lived and where the young men visited every spot which had been sanctified by the presence of their idol. They continued to Munich by way of Nürnberg and Augsburg, where Robert obtained from a friend of his father a letter of introduction to Heinrich Heine, then in Munich. He had a lively conversation with the poet. Possibly if the latter had been able to foresee that the youth before him would become, some years later, one of the greatest musical interpreters of his lyrics he might have treated him with more warmth than he did.

The law was quite as chilling and distasteful as he had foreseen. In a few weeks he wrote to his mother telling, among other things, that “cold jurisprudence, which crushes one with its icy-cold definitions at the very beginning, cannot please me. Medicine I will not and theology I cannot study.... Yet there is no other way. I must tackle jurisprudence, however cold, however dry it may be.... All will go well and I won’t look with anxious eyes into the future which can still be so happy if I do not falter”. Actually, Robert’s mind was made up from the start. He would continue with the law only as long as he had to. Before renouncing it altogether he would try the University of Heidelberg, where his friend Rosen was studying and the sympathetic and extremely musical jurist, Anton Friedrich Justus Thibaut, was lecturing.

* * *

The unromantic and featureless environment of Leipzig at first repelled the youth, who keenly missed the amiable surroundings of his native Zwickau. Neither was he happy among the rowdy, swashbuckling students, ever penniless, ever drunk, ever ridiculous in their notions of “patriotism”. For a while Robert was a member of some of the “Burschenschaften”, the student clubs, though he shunned his rough associates as much as he could. In one respect, however, he resembled them—he was continually poor and everlastingly driven to borrowing.

Unquestionably the circle of acquaintances Robert made during his first days in Leipzig was not large, though he was very happy to find his old friends from Zwickau, Dr. and Mrs. Carus. At their home he met some musicians of prominence—Heinrich Marschner, then conductor of the Leipzig Stadttheater; Gottlob Wiedebein, a song composer of some distinction at the time; and two people who, almost more than any others, were destined to play crucial roles in his life—the piano teacher, Friedrich Wieck, and his nine-year-old daughter, Clara, whom her father was assiduously grooming for a great artistic career.

* * *

Wieck, in particular, was a rather extraordinary if unsympathetic person. He had had a difficult and impecunious youth, kept body and soul together by giving music lessons for a few pennies a week and subsisted largely on the bounty of friendly families who invited him, now and then, to a dinner of roast mutton and string beans. He aspired to become a minister, studied theology but preached no more than a trial sermon. He was something of a traveler and had been to Vienna, where he met Beethoven. The privations and troubles of his youth hardened his character. His first wife stood his spectacular tantrums for eight years, then obtained a divorce and married a Berlin musician named Bargiel. By this second marriage the mother of Clara Wieck had a son, Woldemar, who later made a name for himself as a composer.

Though a hard-boiled martinet and, as time went on, a tyrant of the first order, Wieck was not wholly without good qualities. His unscrupulous treatment of Schumann and his own daughter has made him the object of much historical obloquy, in the main abundantly justified. Yet he was a good teacher, for all his irascible, disputatious ways and his devotion to the artistic causes he believed in could be very genuine. From the first he appreciated Schumann’s creative talent and never concealed the fact, outrageously as he came to demean himself to the composer and Clara alike. Clara was, of course, her father’s most famous pupil. Yet he had others, notably his daughter by his second marriage, Marie, and Hans von Bülow. The qualities he aimed to cultivate in his pupils were, according to Clara, “the finest taste, the profoundest feeling and the most delicate hearing”. To this end he demanded that his students listen to great singers as much as possible and even learn to sing themselves.

Exactly a year after he had come to Leipzig Robert was off to Heidelberg there, ostensibly, to carry on his legal studies with Thibaut and another famous jurist, Mittermeier. Yet what chiefly busied him at Heidelberg was not jurisprudence but music. Under the teaching which, in Leipzig, he had begun to enjoy with Wieck he was developing into a first rate virtuoso and stirred all who heard him, especially by his fantastic skill in improvisation. Before long he was turning down invitations to concertize in places like Mannheim and Mainz. He practised tirelessly, played, composed, read, “poetized” and became one of the social lions of the neighborhood as well. Out of his old guardian, back in Zwickau, he wheedled money enough to defray the expenses of a summer jaunt to Italy. Shortly after his return he heard Paganini in Frankfort and reacted to the overwhelming impression in much the same manner as his contemporary, Liszt, and in an earlier day, Schubert. It was out of this revelation of diabolical virtuosity that his piano transcriptions of certain Paganini violin Caprices—overshadowed subsequently by those of Liszt—were to grow.