Robert Schumann

• 1. Introduction

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  Robert Schumann was born on the 8th of June 1810 in Zwickau, in the Kingdom of Saxony, into a family of booksellers and translators with no particular musical connections. His father August made his fortune selling German translations of Cervantes, Walter Scott and Lord Byron. The boy who grew up browsing those shelves would spend the rest of his life trying to fuse the worlds of literature and music into something the concert hall had never heard before. He would also wage a twenty-year inner war between poetry and the law, nearly destroy his chance at a performing career, fight his own teacher in court over the right to marry, and then, at the height of his powers, throw himself into the Rhine. The questions his life raises are not small ones. What drove a man of such imaginative gifts to such extremes? And why, a century and a half after his death, do pianists still argue about which Robert Schumann they are really playing?

• 2. Two Sides of One Soul

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  August Schumann died in 1826, and his widow persuaded her son to study law. Schumann entered Leipzig University in March 1828 with a roommate who later claimed he never once set foot in a lecture hall. Schumann himself told a different story in writing, insisting he was "industrious and regular" and was "only now beginning to appreciate" the true worth of jurisprudence. He was developing expensive tastes for champagne and cigars at the same time. The contradiction was not accidental. From his earliest years Schumann identified two warring personalities inside himself, and he eventually gave them names: "Eusebius" for the introspective, poetic side, and "Florestan" for the impetuous, dynamic one. He introduced these alter egos formally in his 1832 piano piece Papillons, which depicts twin brothers, one a dreamer and the other a worldly realist, both in love with the same woman at a masked ball. He embedded them again in Carnaval, Op. 9, completed in early 1835, and in the first movement of his Piano Concerto, where the vigorous opening bars give way to a wistful A minor theme in the fourth bar. The Florestan-Eusebius duality was not merely a compositional device. It shaped his journalism as well. From March 1834 Schumann sat on the editorial board of the Neue Leipziger Zeitschrift für Musik, which he reconstituted under his sole editorship in January 1835 as the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. He populated its pages with a fictional brotherhood he called the Davidsbündler, named after the Biblical David who fought the Philistines, a band of imaginary champions for musical truth who blurred the line between his inner world and the real one. He edited that journal for ten years.

• 3. The Hand That Would Not Obey

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  Niccolò Paganini played in Frankfurt in April 1830, and Schumann was in the audience. Watching that performance crystallised something for him. He had been a piano student of Friedrich Wieck, the leading teacher in Leipzig, since 1829, and Wieck had assured his mother that with hard work Schumann could become a leading pianist within three years. On the 30th of July 1830 Schumann wrote to his mother with rare clarity: "My entire life has been a twenty-year struggle between poetry and prose, or call it music and law". The law lost. But so, soon, did the fantasy of a performing career. A growing paralysis in at least one finger of his right hand had begun showing symptoms while he was still a student at Heidelberg. He tried every treatment then available: allopathy, homeopathy, electric therapy. None worked. By 1832 he accepted that he could never play as a virtuoso. The injury had one strange benefit, exempting him from compulsory military service because he could not fire a rifle. For Schumann, losing the piano as a performing instrument meant turning all of that energy toward composition, and toward the peculiar, cycle-based piano writing for which he became known. Among the major works produced in the years that followed were Kreisleriana in 1837, Davidsbündlertänze in 1837, Kinderszenen in 1838 and Faschingsschwank aus Wien in 1839. That last title, Carnival Prank from Vienna, was a reminder that Schumann's Vienna period had been a professional failure. The city never embraced him the way Leipzig did.

• 4. The Wiecks Versus Schumann

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  Clara Wieck made her concerto debut at the Leipzig Gewandhaus on the 9th of November 1828, with Felix Mendelssohn conducting. She was not yet a teenager, but the performance, as the musical scholar Joan Chissell put it, "set the seal on all her earlier successes". Schumann had watched her career with approval since she was nine years old. By January 1836 they had declared their love for each other. What followed was four years of legal warfare. Friedrich Wieck refused his consent to the marriage, fearing Schumann would be unable to provide for his daughter, that Clara would have to abandon her career, and that she would be legally obliged to relinquish her inheritance to her husband. The battle was bitter enough that a court had to rule in the couple's favour. They married on the 12th of September 1840, the day before Clara's twenty-first birthday. By any measure, Schumann married up in terms of reputation: Clara was the more celebrated of the two, a pianist of international standing. Her career was repeatedly interrupted by the births of their seven children. She was also the inspiration for some of his most intimate work. His Piano Quintet in E major, Op. 44, composed in 1842, was written for and dedicated to her, and the musicologist Linda Correll Roesner notes that it quotes a theme Clara herself had composed. The reconciliation with Wieck came in 1843 when the older man approached his son-in-law with an offer of peace. Schumann accepted. The resumed relationship remained polite rather than close.

• 5. The Year of Song

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  During 1840 Schumann produced more than half his total output of songs, a period he called his Liederjahr. The works from that single year include Dichterliebe, sixteen songs setting words by Heinrich Heine; Frauenliebe und Leben, eight songs on poems by Adelbert von Chamisso; two separate cycles both titled Liederkreis; and Myrthen, a wedding present for Clara comprising twenty-six songs drawn from ten different writers. Schumann wrote more than 300 songs across his career, and according to the authors of The Record Guide he stands as one of the four supreme masters of the German Lied, alongside Schubert, Brahms and Hugo Wolf. Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians calls him "the true heir of Schubert" in the genre. What distinguished him from predecessors was his sense that words and music deserved an equal partnership, a relationship without precedent in the German song tradition. His piano accompaniments carried their own weight, especially in the preludes and postludes that often summed up what the voice had just sung. These cycles were rarely performed complete in Schumann's lifetime. The first documented complete public performance of Dichterliebe did not take place until 1861, five years after the composer's death, when the baritone Julius Stockhausen sang it with Brahms at the piano. Stockhausen also gave the first complete performances of Frauenliebe und Leben and the Op. 24 Liederkreis.

• 6. Breakdown, Brahms, and the Rhine

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  In early 1843 Schumann suffered a severe mental crisis, the worst of several attacks that Hall suggests may have been congenital, pointing to similar episodes in his father August and in his sister Emilie. He recovered to complete Das Paradies und die Peri, premiered at the Gewandhaus on the 4th of December 1843. That work, more than any other, made Schumann's name internationally: Tchaikovsky described it as a "divine work" and said he "knew nothing higher in all of music". Wagner privately admitted he was jealous that Schumann had done it. The move to Düsseldorf in 1850, where Schumann accepted the post of director of music, was meant to bring financial stability. It brought instead a slow unravelling. His shyness and mental instability made conducting untenable, and by 1853 his removal from the post had become unavoidable. That same year, the twenty-year-old Johannes Brahms arrived with a letter of introduction from the violinist Joseph Joachim. Brahms played the first of his piano sonatas, and Schumann rushed from the room and returned with Clara, saying "Now, my dear Clara, you will hear such music as you never heard before; and you, young man, play the work from the beginning". Schumann's last published article, titled "Neue Bahnen" (New Paths), extolled Brahms as a musician destined "to give expression to his times in ideal fashion". In February 1854 Schumann's health collapsed entirely. On the 27th of February he threw himself into the Rhine and was rescued by fishermen. At his own request he was admitted to a private sanatorium at Endenich, near Bonn, on the 4th of March. The director of the sanatorium believed that contact between patients and relatives impeded recovery, so Clara was not allowed to see her husband until nearly two and a half years into his confinement, arriving only two days before his death. Brahms and Joachim were permitted to visit. Schumann died on the 29th of July 1856, aged 46. The recorded cause of death was pneumonia.

• 7. A Legacy Rebuilt

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  For much of the late nineteenth century and through the twentieth, critics argued that Schumann's later works lacked the inspiration of his early music. The composer Felix Draeseke put it bluntly: "Schumann started as a genius and ended as a talent". The composer and oboeist Heinz Holliger described a "pious veil of silence" obscuring the later works in favour of the celebrated early and middle period pieces. The tide has shifted. Hall attributes some of this reassessment to more frequent performances and recordings, and to the influence of historically informed performance practice applied to mid-nineteenth-century music. The suppression of the later works was not only a matter of critical taste. The supposedly complete edition published between 1879 and 1887 and edited by Clara and Brahms deliberately left some of Schumann's later music out, on the grounds that it reflected his mental decline. The University of Cologne began addressing that gap in the 1980s by establishing a research department to locate all the composer's manuscripts. The resulting New Schumann Complete Edition runs to 49 volumes and was completed in 2023. Among those whom Schumann influenced were composers across a wide geography: Fauré and Messager made a joint pilgrimage to his tomb in Bonn in 1879; Grieg wrote that Schumann's songs deserved recognition as "major contributions to world literature"; Elgar called Schumann "my ideal"; and Tchaikovsky, despite criticism of Schumann's orchestration, named him "the most striking exponent of the music of our time". The International Robert Schumann Competition for Piano and Voice, launched in Berlin in 1956 and later moved to Zwickau, keeps his name attached to the living practice of performance. His birthplace in Zwickau is preserved as a museum and hosts an annual festival in his honour.