Robert Schumann (apr 1, 1810 – oct 1, 1856)

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Born a year after his riend Mendelssohn, a few months after Chopin, and just a year before LIszt. He did not come from a musical background, but rather, a literary one: His father was a writer, translator, publisher, and book dealer. Schumann went to university in Leipzig, a much bigger and more important city than his native Zwickau. Initially he studied law, but that held considerably less appeal for him than literature, music, and intense student-life socializing.

Despite getting a late start, Schumann hoped to make his career as a pianist. He was fortunate that Friedrich Wieck, one of the leading piano instructors in Europe, agreed to teach him. Wieck's star student was his own prodigious daughter, Clara, who over her long life would emerge as a powerful musical force in Europe. After years of dispute with her father, many nasty intrigues, and even legal battles, she married Schumann, nine years her senior.

Schumann began as a would-be keyboard virtuoso of the new school, inspired by Paganini, some of whose caprices he arranged for piano around the same time as Liszt did. His pianistic ambitions ended soon after he turned twenty when he injured his right hand. With a performing career thwarter, he turned to composition and to writing passionated music criticism, some of it aimed against the virtuoso life he had so recently been forced to abandon. In one of his early reviews in teh NZM, he warned creative artists of the "poisoned flowers0--the temptations--in their path, namely "the applause of the vulgar crowd and the fixed gaze of sentimental women."

It was in his almost novelistic music criticism that Schumann put forth his aesthetic views. His reviews often took the form of narratives, little stories for which he invented a fictional group called teh Davidsbund (Leage of David). This gang of idealistic musicians, based on sides of his own personality, fought the Goliaths of the press and the routines of academic musical training at conservatories that fostered stylistic uniformity and conservatism. Schumann devised a cast of characters that included FLorestan and Eusebius, his alter-egos. Florestan--named after Beethoven's imprisoned freedom fighter in Fidelio--is extroverted, impulsive, and excitable. Eusebius, on the other hand, represented Schumann's kinder, gentler, more moderate and sensitive nature. A third regular character, Master Raro, was associated with Friedrich Wieck. Thus we have a virtual Freudia psychoanalytic trinity: the instinctually driven, rash, and reckless FLorestan (id), the milder, more sociable Eusebius (ego), and the judgmental Raro (superego). Some of Schumann's reviews consist not of a direct critique but of a reported conversation within this League of David: a public airing of private responses.

Until 1841, Schumann primarily composed keyboard character pieces and songs, both private genres in which Schubert had set the standard. For most of his life Schumann kept a diary, and in 1828, at age eighteen, he noted the Viennese composer's death with sadness. He was very conscious of Schubert as a forebear--exceptionally so for the time, when most German composers sought models chiefly in Beethoven and, more recently, in Bach, and were striving to build a national repertory in the public forms of symphony, operas, and oratorio. Schumann also venerated the great Bs, Bach and Beethoven (and helped discover another--Brahms). He emulated them in his own large orchestral and choral works, which he wrote with increasing frequency as his career progressed.

At the outset, though, in his League of David period, Schumann was among the few who found special inspiration in SChubert, in whom he saw a sort of musical novelist. In a letter to Friedrich Wieck, Schumann compared Schubert directly to the popular Romantic novelist Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, who wrote under the pseudonym Jean Paul. The comparison is especially revealing because Schumann is known to have been inspired in some of his early piano pieces by works of Jean Paul, especially Flegeljahre (Years of Indiscretion), a long coming-of-age Novel. Schumann's identification with this novel was such that he consciously modeled the personalities of his imaginary alter-ego friends, Florestan and Eusebius, on teh twin brothers Walt and Vult, the novel's joint heroes. The mutually reinforcing activities between Schumann the compsoer and Schumann the critic are apparent in a review he wrote of eighteen Schubert dances, Op. 33, in which he (in the guise of Florestan) invents a narrative of a masked ball that connects these otherwise-independent pieces to which Schubert had himself given no titles or program: "No. 1 in A Major. A crowd of masks, drums, trumpets, an extinguisher, a man in a wig:
........... We encounter the same narrative inclination in one of Scuhmann's own earliest piano works, Papillons.

Schumann thus often created literary music without words. Yet even if words do not figure concurrently in his piano music, they are nonetheless often present int heforms of titles, epigraphs, and textual allusions.

Music of letters... Schumann's music is filled with ciphers, codes, and allusions of the most esoteric and private nature, often intended, it seems, for Clara, to whom he wanted to send secret messages.


Some of Schumann's early piano compositions are made up of fragmentary sections linked together in imaginative ways....Schumann has obsession with unconsumated gestures, withheld information, and secrets. The otion of a gragment demands that the beholder relate it to something larger yet absent, to be supplied by an engaged imagination. The beholder, in other words, must add something. Music's hold on our imaginations comes not (or not only) from what the compsoer puts in but from what we ourselves are forced to contribtue before we can take anything out.

As early as 1794, when the idea of the äesthetic"was new and ROmanticism was young, the poet Friedrich Schiller commented on the need for this act of completion on the part of the beholder and the way in which it enriches the experience of art when he wrote: "The real and express content that the poet puts in his work remains always finite; the possible content that he allows us to contribute is an infinite quality."...Romantic artists who wanted to make inclined to leave important thigns deliberately unsaid---to make teh receiver of the art even more of a participant in teh creation of meaning. Among composers it was Schumann, with his allusions, codes, and boundlessly varied unconsummated gestures, who emphasizedthis collaboration between creator and audience to teh highest and most principled degree. That is what the notion of "literary music,"in the profoundest sense, meant.

The broad range of devices Schumann drew from literature and books should be throught of as part of his works rather than as an ëxtramusical"expendable or a amere concession to ünmusical "listeners. He never intended any strict conceptual segregation among the arts, and in fact he abhorred such distinctions. He was committed to the view, as he once put it, that "the aesthetics of one art is that of the others too; only the materials differ."

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