Part 2

To his mother Robert confided little about his creative achievements in his Heidelberg days, the better to prepare her for the more remunerative plan he was forming of a virtuoso career. Yet in this period he conceived several works which were to become part of the foundations of his fame—things like the “Abegg” Variations, the “Papillons”, the superb, vertiginous Toccata. To be sure, the “Papillons” were only begun in Heidelberg and the Toccata revised several years later. A word, however, about the “Abegg” Variations, the composer’s Op. 1. The theme is one of those “alphabetical” inspirations he was to utilize even more imaginatively later on. That is to say it is based on the note succession A, B flat, E, G, G, and its inversion. Schumann had, indeed, known a flirtatious Meta Abegg in nearby Mannheim and had developed a tender feeling for her. Yet when he published the work he found it wiser to resort to mystification and so he dedicated it to an imaginary Countess Pauline von Abegg, who served the purpose just as well. The “Abegg” Variations, though unmistakable Schumann, have rather less than their creator’s subsequent technical ingenuity and seem more like outgrowths of the virtuoso principles of Hummel and Weber.

But the elaborate dreamings and light-hearted pleasures of Heidelberg could not go on forever. On July 30, 1830, Robert took the bull by the horns and confided to his mother that music, not law, was for weal or woe to be his destiny. Wieck was invited to settle the question. That awesome pedagogue wrote to the widow Schumann a long and circumstantial letter, larded with many an “if” and “but”. Having considered the problem from every angle he urged the good woman to yield to her son’s wish. Robert, so Wieck assured her, could under his training become one of the foremost pianists of the time. If the plan misfired he could always return to his legal studies.

To every intent the youth’s course was now clear and, for all time, he was freed from his nightmare. Back in Leipzig Robert took up his residence in the Wieck home, the quicker to pursue his pianistic studies. But in one thing he was less moderate than his teacher could have wished; he obstinately declined to make haste slowly. He would become a great pianist, yet he wanted a short cut to that goal. The idea of practising dull finger exercises for hours on end every day revolted him. Already in Heidelberg he had discussed with his friend, Töpken, a project for overcoming the weakness of the fourth finger. He found an excuse for breaking off his lessons with Wieck a little while and, with his fourth finger held up by some home-made contrivance, he practised furiously in solitude. Precisely what happened we do not know. The first intimation that something was amiss emanated from a letter written to his brother, Eduard, on June 14, 1832. Eduard is instructed to show this passage to his mother: “Eduard will inform you of the strange misfortune that has befallen me. This is the reason of a journey to Dresden which I am going to take with Wieck. Although I undertake it on the advice of my doctor and also for distraction I must do a good deal of work as well there”. Soon afterwards he wrote that his room “looked like an apothecary’s shop”. For years to come letters to one person or another speak of treatments and cures, prospects of improvement or stubborn developments which promise to futilize all his virtuoso ambitions. The long and the short of it was that Robert had so incurably lamed his right hand that for purposes of a public career it was as good as useless. After a fashion he could still play piano; but the particular glory to which he aspired was nipped in the bud.

* * *

Who shall say that the accident was an unmitigated misfortune? Would Schumann have bequeathed us the treasures he did had he wandered incessantly over the map of Europe to gain the transient rewards of an itinerant pianist? Would his characteristic style of piano writing have been what it is? It has been surmised that certain distinctive traits of it are, directly or indirectly, the products of his self-made physical disability. And can we be sure that the nervous instability associated with the inherited illness of the entire Schumann line might not have struck him down even earlier, precipitated by the worries and strains to which an executant is forever subject? If Robert still wished to be a musician it had to be in a creative sense.

Under the circumstances he would require a fuller training than he had yet enjoyed in the technic of composition. Wieck had recommended for a master in theory none other than Cantor Weinlig, the teacher of his own daughter, Clara, and of a certain irresponsible young firebrand named Richard Wagner. Robert did not accept the suggestion. Instead he became a pupil of Heinrich Dorn, recently come to Leipzig, who promised to be a more progressive person. Schumann esteemed Dorn personally and long remained his friend. But soon he was writing to Wieck and his daughter, then off on a concert tour: “I shall never be able to amalgamate with Dorn; he wishes to get me to believe that music is fugue—heavens! how different men are....” Nevertheless he slaved away at his exercises in double counterpoint and when the study became too intolerably dry he moistened it with draughts of champagne! His best lessons in counterpoint he obtained from Bach, who was to remain his supreme divinity all his life. The fugues of the Well Tempered Clavier he analyzed “down to the smallest detail.” When in his melancholy late days he received a visit from the young Czech, Bedrich Smetana, with a plea to advise him about musical studies, the taciturn master said no more than: “Study Bach”. “But I have studied Bach”, protested Smetana. “Study him again”, replied the declining composer and relapsed into moody silence.

It was at Dorn’s home, incidentally, that Schumann made his first acquaintance with Wagner, to whom he played the “Abegg” Variations. Wagner did not care for them on account of their “excess of figuration”. Nevertheless, they soon found a publisher. When the firm of Probst brought out the work the composer was in the highest measure elated, promised each of his Heidelberg acquaintances a free copy and wrote that “his first marriage with the wide world” made him feel as proud as the Doge of Venice at his ceremonial wedding with the Adriatic! The critics were, on the whole, encouraging, though the notorious Rellstab in his review “Iris” deplored the lack in it of any canon or fugue and made fun of “a name one can compose”.

* * *

With the children in the Wieck home Robert was a great favorite. What the youngsters especially enjoyed were the charades he was in the habit of devising for their pleasure, the frightening ghost stories he improvised for them day after day and his shivery enactment of the various spooks. Riddles, fairy tales—there was seemingly no end of the parlor tricks he knew how to provide on the spur of the moment for the tots. This deep understanding of children and their psychology was bound, sooner or later, to find artistic expression and lovely embodiment in music like the “Kinderscenen” and the “Album for the Young”, the one with its “Träumerei”, the other with its “Happy Farmer”.

His grown-up friends he endeavored to choose only among people who genuinely interested him and who shared his tastes. Persons who could not partake his high-flown enthusiasm for Jean Paul or for Bach amounted almost to mortal enemies! As for Clara, his early feelings toward the talented daughter of Wieck were scarcely more than a brother-and-sister affection, even though some of his more extravagant biographers have written nonsense about him worshipping her “like a pilgrim from afar some holy altar-piece”. In his diaries one can find such entries as: “Clara was silly and scared”, “With Clara arm in arm”, “Clara was stubborn and wild”, “Clara plays gloriously”, “She plays like a cavalry rider”, “The ‘Papillons’ she plays uncertainly and without understanding”! And so it goes in continual contradiction. We must bear in mind, however, that Clara was then only about 12 and, however artistically precocious, hardly more than a child. Her father had seen to it that she studied violin and singing and had stiff courses in theory and composition. But it was only after she had been in Paris in Wieck’s company and known Chopin, Mendelssohn, Kalkbrenner, Herz and other great personages of the day that she matured into a young woman who, as Robert said, “could give orders like a Leonore”.

For his part Schumann was composing industriously. It is necessary to bear in mind that his early work, which comprises some of his greatest, is almost exclusively for the piano. Songs form his second creative stage, then chamber, then orchestral music. To be sure, choral works, an opera and miscellaneous creations sometimes cut athwart the other categories. But his works can be easily arranged in their respective classifications. The “Papillons” is probably the first masterpiece which achieved what might be called universality. Doubtless Schumann would have been grieved that anyone should think of the fantastic little dance movements and mood pictures which constitute the set without appreciating their relationship to Jean Paul and his “Flegeljahre”. But the whirligig of time has quite reversed the position of Schumann’s enamoring miniatures and the faded romantic work which inspired them. Today we remember the “Flegeljahre” chiefly because the “Papillons”, after a fashion, recalls it to our attention. But it would be erroneous to imagine that Jean Paul exclusively, accounts for those captivating musical fancies that we meet in this Op. 2—the clock which strikes six at the close, indicating that the imaginary throng of revelers is dispersing; the chord which dissolves, bit by bit, till only a single note remains; the “Grandfathers’ March”, typifying the old fogies and Philistines generally (an ancient tune of folk character, which Bach had introduced into his “Peasant Cantata” many years earlier). Not without reason could Schumann claim “that Bach and Jean Paul exercised the greatest influence on me in my early days”.

* * *

Let us at this point enumerate a few of the men and women who were gradually coming into Schumann’s orbit, who became, more or less, fixtures in his circle, or else grazed its circumference and went their different ways. Among one of the first names we encounter are those of Henriette Voigt, a lady whom Robert was presently to call “his A flat soul”, and Ernestine von Fricken, from the town of Asch, just across the Czech border. Ernestine was a lively and coquettish young person, an adopted illegitimate child, who fascinated Robert, to whom she briefly became engaged, and who passed out of his life as breezily as she had come into it. But if Ernestine was hardly more than a butterfly Robert nevertheless immortalized her. She is the Estrella of the “Carnival” for one thing; and, for another, it was on her account that he utilized in a diversity of ways the musical motto embodied in the letters of her home town, Asch. These “Sphinxes” as the composer called the series of long-held notes (A flat, C, B natural, E flat, C, B, and A, E flat, C and B) are combinations which constitute the basis of numerous pieces in the “Carnival”. They are not only letters which form the name of “Asch” but are also common to that of “Schumann”. Robert was plainly indulging in some more of his little romantic whimsies, mystifications or epigrams!

Other names we must mention—irrespective of chronology—include Ludwig Schunke, an uncommonly sympathetic young pianist, who succumbed early to consumption; Carl Banck, Julius Knorr, A. W. F. Zuccalmaglio, Felix Mendelssohn, Frédéric Francois Chopin, Hector Berlioz, Franz Liszt, Richard Wagner, Ferdinand Hiller, Robert Franz. The list might run on indefinitely!

* * *

These individuals were, for the most part, Davidsbündler. Let us briefly explain: The “League of the Davidites” was an imaginary company, a creation of Schumann’s fancy, composed of many of his friends who appeared to think as he did and were moved by fresh musical and poetic impulses. Their sworn duty was to war on those stodgy traditionalists who harbored principles which impeded artistic progress. Imaginary apostles of the biblical David, the giant killer, they were sworn to smite the Philistines of music, defend and uphold novel, adventurous and worthy trends, publicize or advance indubitable merit and, each after his own fashion, promote the vital and the soundly revolutionary. Schumann enhanced the play-acting spirit of the movement by investing various members of the fraternity with fanciful names. He himself, in true Jean Paul spirit, gave distinctive labels to the opposing aspects of his own creative soul. Thus his fiery, soaring, active personality he called “Florestan”; the tender, dreamy, passive part of his nature he identified as “Eusebius”. When, as sometimes happened, these two irrepressible Davidites threatened to get out of hand, there was called in a moderator to re-establish sanity and balance—one Master Raro, whose model in real life seems to have been Friedrich Wieck. The cast of characters further included “Chiara”, “Chiarina” and “Zilia”—otherwise Clara Wieck; “Felix Meritis”, a thin disguise for Felix Mendelssohn; “Julius”, in actuality Knorr; “Serpentinus”, Carl Banck; “Eleanore”, Henriette Voigt; “St. Diamond”, Zuccalmaglio, and so on for quantity!

As a mouthpiece for his idealistic band Schumann founded, in April 1834, the _Neue Zeitschrift für Musik_—a periodical which endured for over a century. Part of the time he was its acting editor and in any case certain of its most penetrating and prophetic criticisms were his own contributions. Possibly the most famous of these was the jubilant salutation of Chopin’s early Variations on Mozart’s “La ci darem”. This is the article entitled “An Opus 2”, which begins with the excited entrance of “Florestan” shouting to his fellow Davidites those words that have become something like a household expression: “Hats off, gentlemen, a genius!” The other is that greeting to the youthful Brahms, a kind of visionary glorification entitled “New Paths”, written for the _Neue Zeitschrift_ almost on the threshold of Schumann’s last illness and including that pathetic cry: “How I should like to be at the side of the young eagle in his flight over the world!”

A stronghold of conservatism such as Leipzig was not the most fertile ground for a journal like the _Zeitschrift_. More than once Schumann thought very seriously of transferring it to Vienna, which had had such resplendent musical associations and promised much. But when he went there and considered the prospects his heart sank. What chance had such a paper in a city where the iron hand of Metternich unmercifully crushed the life out of every vestige of liberalism and progress? Still, Schumann’s various trips to Vienna were not wholly unproductive. The city provided the inspiration for one of his most treasurable piano works, the buoyant “Faschingschwank aus Wien”. In the first movement of this Robert gave his sly humor and spirit of mockery momentary play by incorporating into the texture of the exuberant music a phrase from the “Marseillaise”, which Metternich’s henchmen had sternly forbidden in the Austrian Empire. Then, too, in Vienna he made the acquaintance of Schubert’s brother, Ferdinand, in whose home countless musical treasures were gathering dust. One of those which he was able to rescue from oblivion was Schubert’s great C major Symphony, which he dispatched to Mendelssohn in Leipzig, who in turn conducted it at a concert of the Gewandhaus.

* * *

But we are anticipating! What should concern us now is the courtship of Clara by Robert which, though it ended happily, was actually a long martyrdom for both and in the best traditions of romantic melodrama. To be sure it left a deep imprint on Schumann’s creative fancy and for this, if for no other reason, the soul struggle was a cloud lined with shining silver. Almost all the piano works of the composer’s early period—in some ways the most yeasty and influential music he gave the world—are in one way or another the fruits of his love.

Clara was nine years younger than her future husband. Their first relationship was, as he had remarked, a thoroughgoing brother and sister one. Robert always admired the pianistic talents of Wieck’s daughter though he never hesitated to criticise defects that came to his attention. But there was hardly a serious love angle to the familiarity. It had been different with the shallow but provocative Ernestine von Fricken, who for some time made her home at the Wieck residence as a piano pupil, and applied her coquetries so successfully to Robert’s susceptible heart that before a year was out he had bought her an engagement ring.

Clara, though she made no complaints, doubtless suspected with her feminine intuition how matters were shaping themselves. At one time Schumann’s mother had said to her: “Some day you must marry my Robert”. Clara never forgot the remark which seemed to be dictated by a kind of presentiment. Somewhat later he told Clara that she was “his oldest love”; and he added: “Ernestine had to come on the scene the better to unite us”. But at this stage Clara’s father gave her little time for brooding even if she had been disposed to indulge in any. He worked her hard, took her on concert tours, culminating in the one to Paris. When she returned home from one of the longest of these absences, Robert was the first caller at the Wiecks’. What impressed her most was what she considered Robert’s coolness; he gave her “hardly so much as a passing greeting”, she later complained to a woman friend. Actually, it was shyness at his sudden realization that Clara was no longer a child but a lovely girl which struck him dumb.

Not till she had gone off on another tour was he a little more explicit. In a letter he wrote her from Zwickau he said: “Through all the joys and heavenly glories of autumn there gazes out an angel’s face, a perfect likeness of a certain Clara whom I well know”; and he ended with “you know how dear you are to me”. Even at that there was no question on either side of outspoken love. There was much music-making to absorb the pair, and musical friends were thronging Leipzig. Mendelssohn arrived and the Davidsbündler jubilated at his coming. Chopin, whom Clara had already met in Paris, was steered by Mendelssohn directly to the Wieck home, where Clara was made to play something of Schumann’s—in this case the F sharp minor Sonata—and then some Chopin Etudes and a concerto movement. Chopin in his turn performed some of his Nocturnes. The fanciful Robert wrote: “Chopin has been here. Florestan rushed upon him. I saw them arm in arm, floating rather than walking—Eusebius”!

Then, one November night, on the eve of another of Clara’s concert trips with her father, Robert called to say farewell for some weeks. At the foot of the stairs down which she lighted him he turned and impulsively took her in his arms. The lightning had struck. “When you gave me the first kiss”, Clara wrote later, “a faintness came over me; everything went black before my eyes; I could scarcely hold the light which was to show you the way”. He went over to Zwickau to hear her. She kissed him again and during the recital he sat in the audience thinking: “There she sits, dainty and lovable in her blue dress, loved and applauded by all, and yet she is mine alone. She knows I am here but must pretend to be unaware of me. You cannot give me so much as one look, you, Clara, in your blue dress!”

For a short time they kept their secret, but Wieck was not long in ferreting out the truth. And now began a conflict which might easily have wrecked the happiness, not to say the lives, of any two sensitive young people less determined and fundamentally hard-headed than this pair. For Robert things were complicated at the outset by the death of his mother, following shortly that of his brother, Julius, and his sister-in-law, Rosalie. The sadistic hate and the almost psychopathic villainy with which Wieck now over a space of years persecuted his daughter and her beloved have been variously explained. It has been claimed—perhaps not wholly without reason—that he was fully aware of the malady which lurked in the Schumann family. Instability and morbid depression had assailed Robert’s sensitive spirit as early as 1833 and he became afflicted with a fear of insanity which was to grow on him and, in the end, to destroy him. Moreover, Wieck, though he prized Schumann’s creative gift highly, questioned the solidity of his material position and the brightness of his prospects. But not even these considerations could really justify such elaborate meanness and robustious fury. There was literally nothing at which he would stop. He threatened at one stage to shoot Robert if ever he crossed the Wieck threshold. He forbade all correspondence between the two lovers. He intrigued against the pair ceaselessly, intercepted letters, lied, conspired. More than once Schumann was driven to desperation by Clara’s long periods of apparent silence. Wieck encouraged Carl Banck to visit his house, then circulated rumors that his daughter had fallen in love with that friend of Robert’s. On one of her visits to Vienna with her father poor Clara, wishing to write to Robert but fearing that the removal of an inkstand for a few minutes might arouse Wieck’s suspicions, found it necessary to tiptoe endlessly from one room to another in order to dip her pen. Her faithful maid, Nanny, abetted her in all her ruses and when, in Leipzig, Clara exchanged a few hurried words with Robert on a dark street corner Nanny stood guard to make sure the coast was clear.

Clara, planning another concert trip to Paris where a smashing artistic success might bring her independence, was horrified to learn that her father washed his hands of the whole scheme and bade her go alone, taking care of all the complicated arrangements of concertizing as best she could. It was a harrowing experience, for the first thing she did was almost to succumb to the wiles of an impostor in Stuttgart. Then, when she reached Paris (her French, incidentally, was very imperfect), she learned to her dismay that all of her more influential friends and colleagues—Mendelssohn, Chopin, Liszt, Paganini among them—were not there as she had expected. Having inherited not a little of her father’s obstinacy Clara stuck it out and, without conquering the French capital, broadened her experience in many ways, even to the extent of learning to cook, and cementing new and valuable friendships, such as one with the singer, Pauline Garcia, which was to endure for a lifetime.

Despite the machinations of Wieck Clara, back in Germany, found a means of making her feelings known to Robert. A devoted friend, Ernst Adolf Becker, suggested that she perform at a Leipzig concert one of Robert’s works. She chose the “Symphonic Studies” (the theme of which the composer had obtained from the Baron von Fricken, the adoptive father of Ernestine). Wieck approved. Tyrant as he was he still kept a soft spot in his heart for Schumann’s music. The composer came to the hall, sat inconspicuously at the rear, listened and—knew! In a flash he understood that when she had lately returned him a package of his letters un-opened she had been acting under duress.