Part 6

A curious feature of most of these early pieces, due to the literary cultivation and to the fanciful bias of their composer's mind, is their constant reference to all sorts of extra-musical interests. Schumann, at this time almost as much a man of letters as of tones, took pleasure in equipping his pieces with an ingenious and amusing series of allusions to places and people, real and fictitious, a kind of running commentary of footnotes on the music, comprehensible only to the initiated. This is managed partly by means of spelling out words in the letters which stand for musical tones,[4] partly by directions printed above the music, like stage directions in a play, and partly by mottoes, both musical and literary, and quotations of original and other melodies. The "Variations," opus 1, are founded on a theme which spells A-B-E-G-G--a pseudonym given by Schumann to a lady whose beauty he had admired.

In the "Faschingsschwank aus Wien" (Carnival Prank at Vienna) he manages the musical quotation with felicitous humor. It seems that the playing of the "Marseillaise" was at that time forbidden by the German authorities, on account of the strongly revolutionary tendencies of public feeling. This police taboo did not prevent Schumann from letting a single strain of the splendid tune flash out from his mosaic of melodies, to the unbounded delight of his audience and the discomfiture of the helpless officials.

Of all his compositions, the "Davidsbündlertänze" is fullest of this tricksy play of imagination, in which he took, as Oscar Bie says, "the pleasure of the delicate man of taste in labelling." From about 1834, when he founded his musical journal, the _Neue Zeitschrift für Musik_, the imaginary society of the _Davidsbund_ played an important part in his mental life. Believing that it was a part of his duty to oppose the philistinism, the dulness, pedantry, and sensuality which pervaded the music of the day, he dramatized the conflict as a struggle between the _Davidsbund_, or club of Davidites, and the forces of Philistia. His fancy played about this central conception until it had evolved a whole company of Davidites, individualizing each one. Several were merely single aspects of their creator's complex temperament. Florestan was the impassioned Schumann, Eusebius the dreamy and tender Schumann, Raro the philosophical mediator between the two. Others indicated friends: Felix Meritis was Mendelssohn; Chiarina, Clara Wieck; Estrella, Ernestine von Fricken, an early sweetheart. Once projected into the actual world, these figments of fancy became very real to their creator. His Sonata, opus 11, was originally printed as "by Florestan and Eusebius." Each of the numbers of the "Davidsbündlertänze" is signed "F.," or "E.," or "F. and E.," and the ascription is always conscientiously justified by the character of the music. In the first edition there are even "stage directions," such as, "Here Florestan stops, his lips trembling painfully," and "Eusebius said too much about this; but his eyes were full of joy." These finical particularities, however, as well as the motto in verse, were in the second edition stricken out.

All these elaborate paraphernalia with which Schumann equipped his first essays in composition are noteworthy not so much for any intrinsic significance as for the light they throw on his peculiar attitude toward an art which most of his predecessors had approached in a wholly objective and detached spirit. The persistent and minute subjectivity they reveal is remarkable in so young a man, working by instinct and in despite of the powerful influence of tradition. Most men approach music through a systematic technical discipline, and achieve individuality of style only with maturity; Schumann, reversing the process, turns to music at first simply as to one of several available ways of expressing a lively imagination, and gains technical skill but gradually and by arduous effort. His eloquence is that of a man filled with matter and enthusiasm, but untrained in oratory; he stammers, hesitates, coins words, improvises phraseology as he goes, and in the end attains fluency by dint of sheer earnestness and conviction. The inner impulse to expression creates its own medium, instead of being itself formed by the medium available; and while a language thus derived offhand has necessarily certain crudities, it has also, of course, a delightful freshness and happy spontaneity.

The inexhaustible tunefulness of the early Schumann is little short of marvellous. Few composers have been so prodigal of lovely melodies. They are like the king's daughters in the fairy tales, each more beautiful than the last; and though there is doubtless a family resemblance, each has a distinct physiognomy, a pronounced individuality. They are, for the most part, indeed, brief, striking motives rather than deliberately composed tunes, perfect but minute crystals of most various shapes, forming spontaneously in the highly saturated solution of the musical thought. No effort is made to purify, separate, or collect them; what their composer seems chiefly to value is their profusion and luxuriance. To state the same thing in more technical terms, there is next to no thematic development; there is simply the presentation of one charming phrase after another. The result is of course a certain fragmentariness and whimsicality; the music impresses us not by its cumulative power, its orderly advance, but by the sheer charm of its primitive elements.

The vigor of the rhythms never flags. Short notes in "dotted rhythms," holds from unaccented to accented beats, and all manner of devices for intensifying accentuation, give an inimitable elasticity to such things as the first of the "Intermezzi," the sixth, seventh, ninth, and final sections of the "Impromptus on a Theme of Clara Wieck," the ninth of the "Davidsbündlertänze," "Préambule," "Coquette," "Chiarina," "Valse Allemande," and the final march in the "Carnaval," "Aufschwung" in the "Phantasiestücke," and many others. There is to be observed also a constant tendency to emphasize the metre by slight but systematic deviations from it, such as syncopation and the shifting of motives into artificial relations to the measure, and the simultaneous use of two or more metrical schemes at once. Interesting examples of this sort of intensive syncopation occur in "Grillen," one of the "Phantasiestücke," in the B-flat major section of the eighth "Novelette," and in the "Faschingsschwank aus Wien." A delightfully quaint use of shifted motives is made in the finale of the Sonata, opus 11. The theme of the movement, though written in triple measure, consists entirely of two-beat motives, so that there is a constantly felt, and very exciting, opposition between metrical and rhetorical accents.

The motive of the scherzo of the same work is treated in a somewhat similar way. Of all the many instances which might be mentioned of a simultaneous use of two metrical schemes, one of the most consummate is the employment, in "Des Abends," of three groups of two sixteenth-notes in the melody, against two groups of three sixteenths in the accompaniment--a subtlety often missed by pianists, but essential to the charm of the piece. The first two numbers of the "Davidsbündlertänze" also present attractive oppositions of metre.