Part 7

After his marriage he turned to the larger forms of composition, which he took up in a curiously methodical rotation. First came, in 1841, three symphonies, the B-flat major, opus 38, the so-called "Overture, Scherzo, and Finale," and the D-minor, published many years later as opus 120. The piano concerto was also begun. In 1842 his interest was shifted to chamber music, and the three quartets for strings, the piano quartet, and the piano quintet appeared in rapid succession. Not until 1843 did he essay, in "Paradise and the Peri," a large choral work, but thereafter several such works appeared from time to time. Thus we see that while his more romantic compositions were for the most part produced in the years of youth and courtship, he turned, when once he had begun to face life as it is, in all its tragedy and difficulty as well as its human beauty and sweetness, to the severer, grander forms of music. In spite of the happiness he found in one of the most perfect of marriages, we must remember that this union also involved new responsibilities, anxieties, and distractions. It brought with it novel social and professional duties, children to be protected, guided, and helped, and above all the grinding routine by which the daily bread of an artist has to be earned. How severe the conditions were we have only recently learned from the complete biography of Clara Schumann.[9] In her diary we read of the constant struggles of these sensitive people to get the mere necessaries of life; of the husband's steadily increasing ill-health, physical and mental, ending in insanity and early death; of enforced migrations to Dresden and Düsseldorf in search of more lucrative posts for him as an orchestral conductor, and of the defeat of even these efforts by the incompetence of disease; and of the wife's loyal resumption of concert playing, in order to fill the family purse. All this experience of the sordid actualities with which the world always tests its idealists was well calculated to make even Schumann take a sober, and at times a tragic, view of life; and though he is always noble and devoted, there is often in his chance remarks, as years go on, a note of weariness, melancholy, or philosophic resignation. It is not that he surrenders his ideals--only that he finds them more difficult of realization than he had supposed in the flush of youth, and under the buffets of fate retires somewhat into himself, and chastens his enthusiasm into a stoical faith and a more patient loyalty. This change of temper inevitably makes itself felt in such characteristic music as the solemn introduction and the aspiring adagio of the C-major Symphony, the mystical "Cathedral Scene" of the "Rhenish Symphony," the sombre and restless "Manfred Overture," the noble "Funeral March" in the Piano Quintet, and the infinitely tender Andante grazioso of the Piano Concerto. The same sincere, simple nature as ever is felt behind these things, but the stream of its emotion is now more profound and quiet, as a river, when it reaches the plains, no longer sparkles and bubbles, but flows tranquil and deep.

Technically, Schumann was handicapped in this new departure by his exclusively pianistic early training. He had acquired a habit of thinking in terms of the piano which it was almost impossible to break, and he had not, like most symphonists, familiarized himself with orchestral instruments from boyhood. The consequence was that he made many blunders in his first essays in instrumentation, and never scored with the ease, certainty, and effectiveness of a master. An oft-cited instance is the opening horn-phrase of the first symphony, originally written as at (_a_) in Figure VIII, in which form it is grotesquely ineffective on account of the muffled quality, on the horn, of the fifth and sixth tones, and changed only on second thought, after rehearsal, to its present form, (_b_).

Theme and Stretto from the Finale of the Impromptus, opus 5.

Figure X.

The habitual use of the sequence, the canon, and even the fugato, though always in an impressionistic, romantic vein, also presses itself constantly upon our attention. Such contrapuntal habits soon became instinctive and unconscious with Schumann. "In my latest compositions," he remarks in 1838, "I often hear many things that I cannot explain. It is most extraordinary how I write almost everything in canon, and then only detect the imitation afterwards, and often find inversions, rhythms in contrary emotion, etc." But the explanation is given by a sentence in the same letter: "Bach is my daily bread; he comforts me and gives me new ideas."

So beneficent in the small pieces, the inspiration of the Bach polyphony became invaluable in the larger works. To it are traceable the supreme passages in the symphonies, such as the profoundly thoughtful introduction of the C-major, with the rugged dissonances resulting from the superposing of the call of horns and trumpets upon the inexorable progression of the strings, the insistently climactic introduction of the D-minor, and the entire movement in the E-flat major known as the "Cathedral Scene," which is surely not the least of the monuments of Gothic art, though its massive pediments and soaring arches are carved of immaterial tones. In his three essays in the string quartet, the most exacting of all mediums, Schumann's contrapuntal skill is less secure. Failing often to conceive the inner voices independently, he falls into a jerkiness resulting from the constant stoppages of the little phrases; instead of letting the melodies germinate and soar, he constricts them within a predetermined harmonic mould; and the wall-paper patterns inevitably creep in. But in the quartet with piano and still more in the quintet, the contrapuntal stimulus is again efficiently felt. From the soaring imitations of the first page to the two exciting fugatos in the coda of the finale, one on the theme of that movement, and the other, by a happy inspiration, on the theme of the opening allegro, structurally rounding out the entire work, the music bubbles and throbs with melody.

One other great work there is, belonging to this period, which for fecundity of invention, luxuriant richness of coloring, and stoutness of structure deserves to rank with the quintet, if not above it. This is the piano concerto in A-minor, begun in 1841 and completed in 1845,--that is to say, written in the brief prime of Schumann's troubled life, when his powers had been marshalled and coordinated by discipline, and before they had become blighted by disease. It is thus quite up to his early standard in the matter of freshness of melody, rhythmic animation, and exotic gorgeousness of harmony, and at the same time far more firmly knit, more justly proportioned, and more flexibly conceived than the piano sonatas or the string quartets. The sincerity, tenderness, grace, and impetuous enthusiasm of the youthful romanticist are not in the least abated. What could be more contagious than the exuberant first movement, in which one hardly knows which to admire the more, the felicity of such details as the clarinet cantabile, the Andante expressivo for solo piano, and the nobly polyphonic cadenza, or the broadly climactic plan of the whole? What could appeal more simply and directly to the heart than the delicate and yet ecstatic Andante grazioso, with its winding intermeshed melodies, clustering about the violoncello phrases as a grapevine festoons itself upon a tree? Yet perfectly wedded with all this feminine suavity and grace is a more masculine quality, a fine poise, restraint, reservation of force, which counteracts all tendency to feverishness, and gives the work a sort of impersonal dignity and beauty at the opposite pole from the perverse individualism of the "Davidsbündlertänze" and the "Carnaval." One feels that the composer, no longer the victim of his moods, is shaping his work with the serene detachment of the artist. Particularly manifest is this new mastery in the rhythmical treatment of the finale. The rhythms here are as salient, as seizing, as ever, but they are far more various. The contrast between the strongly "three-beat" quality of the initial motif, (_a_) in Figure XI, and the cross accent of twos in the second theme (_b_), is a stroke of positive genius.