Part 3

They still had much to bear, but greatly as it revolted them they realized that the only solution of their difficulties lay in a legal decision. To law, accordingly, they went. Bit by bit Wieck’s case disintegrated. With the help of a friendly advocate Robert was able to show that his means were ample to support a family. Then Wieck played what he believed would be his trump card. He maintained that Schumann was a drunkard! Instantly Robert’s friends rallied to his support, Mendelssohn even declaring himself ready to testify in court that the accusation was outrageously false. On August 12, 1840, the decision was handed down in favor of the sorely tried couple and their marriage received judicial sanction.

On Sept. 5, she gave a concert in Weimar, “my last as Clara Wieck”. One week later (and a day before Clara’s twenty-first birthday), they were married at Schönefeld, a tiny suburb of Leipzig. On the previous evening Robert had brought her a bridal offering richer than fine gold—the song cycle, “Myrthen”, inclosing such deathless blooms as “Die Lotosblume”, “Der Nussbaum”, “Du bist wie eine Blume”, “Widmung”. And when they returned from church next morning Clara wrote in her diary: “A period of my life is now closed.... Now a new life is beginning, a beautiful life, a life in him whom I love above all, above myself. But grave duties rest with me, too...”.

* * *

The period through which we have passed witnessed the birth of many of Schumann’s greatest piano compositions—the “Davidsbündler Tänze”, the “Carnival”, the F sharp minor Sonata, the “Kinderscenen”, the “Symphonic Studies”, the “Kreisleriana”, the C major Fantasie, the “Fantasiestücke”—things which along with others scarcely less great, were to become what might be called daily bread of pianists. His circle of musical friends was steadily widening. Those he esteemed most highly, perhaps, were Mendelssohn and Chopin. Mendelssohn was to both Robert and Clara nothing less than a god. The strange thing about this friendship is that, much as the Schumanns worshipped Mendelssohn’s music, Mendelssohn, to the end of his days, had virtually nothing to say on the subject of Schumann’s. No doubt its novelty, its bold fantasy, its unprecedented imaginative qualities were in a measure alien to Mendelssohn’s ideals of formal logic, clarity, order. It was not in his artistic nature to enjoy the work of a composer who, like Schumann, “dreamed with the pedal down”. By the same token it was the fluency, technical ease and polished workmanship in Mendelssohn’s scores which Robert held in such envious admiration. Yet with all his skill it is certain that Mendelssohn could never, for one thing, have painted so unapproachable a portrait in tones of his friend Chopin as Schumann achieved in one of the most extraordinary pages of the “Carnival”.

Liszt was another master with whom Schumann’s relations were, to put it mildly, singular and paradoxical. For a long time both Robert and Clara were captivated by Liszt’s phenomenal virtuosity and amazing musicianship. Liszt preached Schumann’s greatness both in word and deed. He played his works inimitably and with an originality that brought to light beauties which Schumann, by his own admission, did not even suspect in his own creations. When Clara first played Liszt the “Carnival” he exclaimed that it was one of the greatest pieces of music he knew, vastly to Clara’s delight. Robert impulsively dedicated to Liszt the C major Fantasy (in later years Clara removed the dedication) but as time went on a coolness developed between the two masters, which led to at least one highly embarrassing scene when, on a certain occasion, Liszt, possibly in a spirit of irony, praised the arch-vulgarian, Meyerbeer, at the expense of the recently deceased Mendelssohn. Schumann left the room, fiercely slamming the door behind him. The breach was eventually healed and Liszt championed Schumann quite as he had done earlier. But the friendship had been troubled and, as Schumann’s mental condition worsened, the old relation was never quite restored. Clara, who developed into a good hater in the years of her widowhood, came to harbor an implacable enmity for Robert’s one time friend.

Yet in the early days of their married life things were on the whole, ideal. Robert aspired to deepen Clara’s musical understanding and the pair undertook a systematic study of Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier, he “pointing out the places where the fugue subject reappears” and giving her an insight into technical mysteries which she had hitherto lacked. He himself was inspired by his new found happiness to a perfect deluge of songs—master lyrics which rank with those of Schubert as among the greatest treasurers of song literature. The year 1840 was Schumann’s “song year”. Even before they were married Robert delighted his prospective bride with the information: “Since yesterday morning I have written nearly 27 pages of music, of which I can tell you no more than that I laughed and cried for joy of it.... All this music nearly kills me now, it could drown me completely. Oh, Clara, what bliss to write songs! Too long have I been a stranger to it”. And a little later: “I have again composed so much that it sometimes seems quite uncanny. Oh, I can’t help it, I should like to sing myself to death like a nightingale. Twelve Eichendorff songs! But I have already forgotten them and begun something new”! So it runs on, more extravagantly in letter after letter, as he enriches the world quite effortlessly with the “Lieder und Gesänge”, Op. 27, the Chamisso songs, Op. 31, the “Liederreihe”, Op. 35, the Eichendorff “Liederkreis”, Op. 39, the wonderfully psychological “Frauenliebe und Leben” cycle, the incomparable “Dichterliebe”, the Eichendorff and Heine “Romanzen und Balladen”, and so on—a lyric inundation, seemingly without end. And just because Schumann had developed in his piano works such an individuality of style, and such new phases of keyboard technic the accompaniments he supplied for many of these Lieder made the songs artistic creations of an entirely unprecedented order.

* * *

Robert and Clara found out before long, no doubt, that married people sometimes get in one another’s way. For instance, Robert needed hours and sometimes days and weeks of quiet for his creative work. On such occasions Clara had to put a stop to her practising. The two realized that they were rather more hampered than was agreeable and Robert felt keenly how needful it is for an artist appearing in public to keep up his technical practice. Nevertheless she did manage somehow to get in her necessary hours of practice. Her husband found that “as she lives in nothing but good music her playing is now certainly the wholesomer and also more delicate and intelligent than it was before. But sometimes she has not the necessary time to bring mechanical sureness to the point of infallibility and that is my fault and cannot be helped.... Well, that is the way of artist marriages—one cannot have everything at once.”

The Schumanns would have been glad to see Robert occupied with some regular work outside his compositions and his writings for the _Neue Zeitschrift_. Clara felt that her husband ought to be occupying an important conductor position. She would like to have seen him in such a post at the Leipzig Gewandhaus concerts, which his friend Mendelssohn had raised to such a level of distinction. “Don’t be too ambitious for me”, gently chided Robert, who realized that he was not cut out for a conductor. Yet this ambition was one of Clara’s tragic failings. We have to thank it for Schumann’s later misfortunes when he let himself be stampeded into accepting a batonist’s post at Düsseldorf which probably accelerated his final breakdown. “I wish no better place for myself than a pianoforte and you near me”, he had said not long after they were married. But Clara was to be incorrigible. She was one of those typical ambitious wives who drive their husbands into careers for which they know themselves to be totally unfitted. Yet the greater the inroads made by Robert’s deep-seated malady on his nervous system the more incapable he seemed of resisting Clara’s urging.

What promised to be a solid and permanent position for Schumann materialized in the spring of 1843 when Mendelssohn founded the Leipzig Conservatory. Robert was given charge of the classes in piano playing; and he taught private composition. His colleagues were men like the theorist Hauptmann, the violinist, Ferdinand David, Moscheles, Plaidy, Richter, Klengel and others of distinguished standing. But it does not appear that Schumann’s actual teaching can have amounted to much. For he was growing more and more uncommunicative and the fitness as a pedagogue of such a silent teacher may be doubted. In 1844 his duties at the Conservatory were interrupted for four months when he accompanied Clara on a concert tour to Russia and finally ceased in the autumn when he suffered a severe nervous breakdown which led to his removal to Dresden. Some months earlier he had renounced the editorship of the _Zeitschrift_. To his friend, Verhulst, he wrote in June, 1844: “I have given up the paper for this year and hardly think I shall ever resume it. I should like to live entirely for composition”. Shortly afterwards the _Zeitschrift_ passed into the hands of Liszt’s friend, Franz Brendel.

Schumann was now definitely a sick man. Clara wrote in her diary that she feared he would not survive the journey to the Harz mountains and to Dresden which they had planned in the hope of restoring him; “Robert did not sleep a single night, his imagination painted the most terrible pictures, in the early morning I generally found him bathed in tears, he gave himself up completely”. The change of scene and society helped him, however, and they resolved to settle permanently in Dresden, whither they moved in the last days of 1844.

* * *

A period of fertile productivity lay behind him. If 1840 was Robert’s “song year”, 1841 was his “symphony year” and 1842 his “chamber music year”, though this should not be taken as meaning that his creations at this time were limited to a few works in these genres exclusively. First of all came the B flat Symphony—the “Spring” Symphony—which Schumann wrote down with a steel pen he had found in Vienna in the Währinger Cemetery, on Beethoven’s grave. The “Spring Symphony”, though it had its detractors, put Schumann on the map, so to speak, more almost than anything else he had written heretofore. Immediately after the symphony came two other large-scale works—the so-called “Overture, Scherzo and Finale” (which modern conductors have singularly neglected) and a Phantasie in A minor, for orchestra and piano, which was to become the first movement of the glorious Piano Concerto—for not a few musicians the greatest of its kind in existence!

On the heels of this soaring masterpiece Schumann embarked on another symphony. “As yet I have heard nothing about it”, wrote Clara in her diary, “but from Robert’s way of going on and the D minor sounding wildly in the distance, I know that another work is being created in the depth of his soul”. Less than four months later Robert handed his wife as a birthday gift the score of the D minor Symphony. It was not to see the light of publicity for some time, however. Before Schumann had put the finishing touches on it his thoughts began to be occupied with the subject of “Paradise and the Peri”, from Thomas Moore’s “Lalla Rookh”, and he opined that “perhaps something fine can be made out of it for music”. He was right, though the beautiful oratorio—one of the finest yet (in America) least familiar of Schumann’s major works—was not completed for nearly two years more. When it finally appeared the composer described it as “an oratorio for cheerful people, not for the place of prayer”.

In the spring of 1842 Robert and Clara had been occupied with the study of the string quartets of Haydn and Mozart. The following October he wrote to the publisher, Haertel: “During the summer months I worked with great zeal at three quartets.... We played them several times at David’s and they seemed to please players and listeners alike, in particular Mendelssohn....” They are the Quartets in A minor, F major and A major, Op. 41. For one thing, they contain some of the most unusual effects of syncopated rhythm to be found in the entire range of Schumann’s compositions. On the heels of the quartets came the most popular sample of Schumann’s chamber music, the E flat Piano Quintet, Op. 44, the first movement of which is perhaps as fine a thing as its creator ever achieved. Other chamber works followed—the E flat Piano Quartet, Op. 47, the so-called Phantasiestücke, for piano, violin and cello, Op. 88, none of them, however, rising above the level of the Quintet.

The first of the Schumann children, Marie and Elise, were born in 1841 and 1843, respectively. The succeeding ones were Julie, Emil, Ludwig, Ferdinand, Eugenie and Felix. Alone, Marie and Eugenie lived to what one can call a ripe old age. The hereditary Schumann illness passed on to another generation.

* * *

Dresden promised to be a pleasant home for the Schumanns and their growing family. The town was a center of art and literature. Painters, sculptors, architects, writers, musicians assembled there, lured by an art-loving Court. Among the prominent musical figures of the town were Ferdinand Hiller, Karl Gottlieb Reissiger and Richard Wagner. Reissiger was, of course, a mediocrity of the sorriest kind. Hiller, on the other hand, was a pupil of Hummel and a friend of Berlioz, Liszt and Mendelssohn and the Schumanns were thoroughly at home in his company. Wagner was a horse of another color! It is everlastingly to be regretted that temperamental differences kept him and Schumann from amalgamating, for their liberal artistic slants and their incorruptible idealism should have made them fellow fighters in the cause of musical progress. Unfortunately the pair seemed almost to bristle at each other’s approach. Had Wagner matured in his art as early as Schumann in his, or could they have known one another in the fine frenzy of Schumann’s early Davidsbündler days the story might have been of an inspiring artistic relationship.

Wagner had been a contributor to Schumann’s _Zeitschrift_ and had entertained a flattering idea of some of Robert’s earlier music. Rightly enough, he noted in it “much ferment but also much originality”. He continued to like “Paradise and the Peri” and the Piano Quintet and, afterwards, during his Swiss exile, he went so far as to entreat Clara to play at one of her Zurich concerts the “Symphonic Studies”. But thrown frequently together in Dresden the two repelled rather than attracted each other. Wagner, who talked incessantly, complained that one could get nowhere with a person who refused to open his mouth; Schumann, that one could not possibly exchange ideas with a man who never allowed one the opportunity to say a word. Moreover, Wagner’s far-darting and flamboyant ideas were unintelligible to poor Schumann and even frightened him. And so the two seemed everlastingly at cross purposes.

Wagner gave Schumann a score of his “Tannhäuser” as soon as it appeared in a lithographed form. Writing to Mendelssohn Robert repudiated the music as weak, forced, amateurish, deficient in melody and wanting in form. Not long afterwards he went to hear the work and took back much of what he had said, declaring that the impression created by a stage performance was very different and that, though the score did not radiate the “pure sunlight of genius” the opera, nevertheless, exercised on the hearer “a mysterious magic which held one captive”. He had been deeply moved by much of it; and he praised the technical effects and above all the instrumentation (a thing for which Schumann himself had always been reproved). Yet in another missive he declared that Wagner could not write four consecutive bars of “correct” music, that he was, all in all, a “bad musician”. From the viewpoint of his own art Robert was to a certain degree logical in his claims. But his prophetic vision and artist’s conscience refused to let him reject the work outright. Nor should we judge him too severely for his conclusions. After “Tannhäuser” he never heard a note of Wagner’s music. However he might have reacted to “Tristan” it is hardly possible that Schumann could have brought himself to dismiss Wagner as a “bad musician” if he had been spared to hear “Die Meistersinger”!

Schumann was present when Wagner read one evening to an assemblage of acquaintances his “Lohengrin” libretto. Like a number of other listeners he could not grasp just what method Wagner could employ in setting such a text to music. Furthermore he was upset that another had beat him to the subject of the swan knight, which he had half a mind to utilize for an opera himself.

* * *

Ill health pursued Schumann more and more implacably during the six odd years of his Dresden sojourn. He had moments when things seemed to brighten. At other times the slightest mental effort produced sleepless nights, auricular delusions, new and terrifying symptoms which came to haunt him as others disappeared. He was morbid, irritable, had visions of “dark demons” and was assailed by “melancholy bats”.

Music sometimes helped and sometimes hindered. Nevertheless the Dresden period saw the creation of some of his greatest works—the completion in 1845, of the A minor Piano Concerto, by the addition of the Intermezzo and the Finale to the Phantasie written in 1841; the magnificent C major Symphony, with its melting Adagio, its breathless scherzo, its resplendent finale; the “Scenes from Faust”, the Overture and incidental music to Byron’s “Manfred” and the opera, “Genoveva”.

Limitations of space forbid us to consider in any detail works like the Piano Concerto, the C major Symphony and the rugged “Manfred” Overture—so different in its sombre, moody character from the romantic effusions of Schumann’s earlier day. But the opera, “Genoveva” though branded a failure contains superb music, beginning with the overture which, in its different fashion, ranks with the one to “Manfred”. The prayer of the fated Genoveva in the last act is a long _scena_ comparing in its far-flung lyric line with the noblest vocal pieces Schumann ever wrote.

* * *

Clara cared tenderly for her ailing husband and left nothing undone to comfort him. She would use all her culinary skill to make it certain that his meals would be bright spots in his often troubled days. A friend who met her returning from market in one instance inquired what she was carrying in a strange-looking packing. “Something to tempt my poor husband’s appetite—mixed pickles”, she answered. They had friends in a certain Major Serre and his wife who had a country estate at a place called Maxen, near Dresden, and she took Robert there from time to time to benefit by the pleasant country surroundings. But his stay in Maxen was spoiled by the view from one of the windows of a lunatic asylum nearby. And as the years passed and his condition deteriorated the sight of an asylum brought his melancholy to an almost intolerable stage.

It was to Maxen that Clara brought him and her children when, during the revolutionary uprising in May, 1849, they found it necessary to flee from Dresden till order was restored. Pretending to take her husband for a walk she picked her way at sundown through the fields and hills surrounding the city and reached the Serre estate in the small hours of the morning, terrified by the armed mobs they continually met and the sounds of shooting in the distance. Then, without waiting to rest or refresh herself, Clara had to set out for Dresden once more to bring the children to a place of safety. Back in Maxen she restrained her feelings with difficulty when she was met by contemptuous allusions from her aristocratic hosts to “canaille” and “rabble”. “How men have to fight for a little freedom!” she confided in her diary. “When will the time come when all men will have equal justice? How is it possible that the belief can so long have been rooted among the nobles that they are of a different species from the bourgeois?”

In the fall of 1849 Schumann received a letter from Ferdinand Hiller, on the point of leaving Düsseldorf, inquiring whether he would be disposed to succeed him as Musical Director in that Rhenish town. The salary was good, the duties heavy but stimulating. Schumann reflected that Dresden had never shown itself in the least inclined to give the illustrious artist couple within its gates the faintest official recognition. Hiller’s offer seemed promising. Robert started to look up information about Düsseldorf. In an old geography book he found that the town’s attractions included “three convents and a lunatic asylum”. Nevertheless, they decided in its favor.

They took a cool farewell from Dresden and arrived in Düsseldorf on Sept. 2, 1850. They were greeted with extreme cordiality, wined and dined, serenaded and threatened with the exhausting honors of dances, picnics and excursions. Until they could find a suitable house and garden they were lodged in the best (and most expensive!) hotel. The Music Committee turned itself inside out to make life pleasant for its new conductor and his illustrious artist-wife. Robert was forty, seemingly in the prime of life but actually past his best creative period, and glad that an apparently desirable opportunity was opening up to him at last.

* * *

Tragic deception! Whether or not Schumann realized it from the first, the Düsseldorf period was the beginning of the end. It quickly became obvious that Robert had no ability whatever as a conductor, none of the dominating qualities to impose his wishes on orchestras or choral masses. He could think of no better methods of correcting a defect of execution than to ask his players or singers to repeat a passage over and over, without ever making plain to them what he wanted. The performers became listless, inattentive or downright rebellious. Things grew progressively worse and the decline of musical standards in Düsseldorf became town talk. The worry and physical strain involved told sorely in Schumann’s afflicted nervous constitution. He developed an embarrassing habit of dropping his baton at rehearsals, till he hit on the scheme of fastening it to his wrist with a piece of string! “There, now it can’t fall again!”, he sheepishly told a friend who gazed at his arm in questioning wonder. His mental ailment bit by bit robbed him of the alertness, concentration, presence of mind, “even the ability to speak audibly”. Clara, unable apparently to recognize the truth, suspected intrigues on every hand. Her blood “boiled” over the “disrespectful behaviour of some of the choir” at a rehearsal of the “St. Matthew Passion” and she developed a particular enmity against the well-meaning if uninspired conductor, Julius Tausch, who gradually took over some of Schumann’s most taxing labors.