Robert Schumann - Biography
Robert Schumann was born on June 8th, 1810 in Zwickau, Saxony and died in Endinich, Prussia on July 29th, 1856. He was the youngest of five children born to a bookseller/novelist and his wife. Schumann started receiving musical training at the age of ten (not surprising considering his father’s background) but his main youthful interests were literary and philosophical. He entered the University of Leipzig in 1828 to pursue a legal career. While in Leipzig he studied piano with the well-known teacher Friedrich Wieck who would later become his father-in-law. In 1829 he went to Heidelberg for intensive musical instruction. The following year Schumann returned to Leipzig and moved into the Wieck household.
At this time Schumann started exhibiting symptoms of severe bi-polar illness which verged on psychosis. He experienced auditory hallucinations, periods of manic activity contrasting with periods of severe lethargy and suicidal thoughts. To some extant this seems to have a hereditary component since his father and some of his siblings also suffered from severe nervous disorders.
In his early twenties, Schumann modeled himself after one of his heroes –the great German writer/composer ETA Hoffmann. Schumann was a good looking man and cut a dashing figure as a young bohemian in Leipzig. Several young writers of the period, including Jean Paul Richter, Heinrich von Kleist, Friedrich Hölderlin and Heinrich Heine, were at the forefront of the German Romantic movement became inspirational figures to Schumann. He fervently took up the cause of Franz Schubert who had recently died at 31 and was, at the time, an almost an unknown figure.
In his early 20s, Schumann began to venture into composition with some songs (songs were ultimately to make up the largest component of his output). His first well-known piano pieces Abegg Variations and Papillion’s (Butterflies) are from this early period. His embryonic career as a piano virtuoso was quickly curtailed by a permanent injury to the muscles of the middle fingers in his right hand, probably caused either by an unorthodox manner of practicing or from mercury poisoning.
His teacher, Friedrich Wieck, had a pretty young daughter named Clara who was also a highly regarded piano prodigy by her early teens. By the time Clara was in her mid-teens Schumann was in love with her, despite her being nine years his junior. Her father (who is viewed in music history lore as something of an ogre –a sort of musical equivalent of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s father) had good reason to forbid a romance between Schumann (knowing of his mental instability) and his underage daughter.
In 1834, Schumann helped found a musical journal, Die Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (a New Journal for Music) with Julius Knorr. In this publication he hailed Chopin, Berlioz and Mendelssohn as the new geniuses and decried the salon-ready, superficial virtuosity that was popular at the time. He created alter egos for himself that he would use to sign off his reviews –Florestan and Eusebius.
At this point of his career Schumann was a cigar-smoking, hard-drinking bohemian. While forbidden from seeing Clara Wieck, he had an intense romance with a 16-year-old named Ernestine von Fricken. Though she came from a wealthy family, when Schumann found out that she was born out of wedlock (and he would therefore have no dowry) he put an end to the affair and turned his attentions back to Clara –who had to wait till her 21st birthday before she was able to marry Schumann despite her father’s legal efforts to block the union.
In his mid-to-late twenties, Schumann wrote many of the extended piano pieces (often with a literary subtext) that were the first true flowering of his musical genius, Carnival (1834), Symphonic Etudes (1834), Daividsbunlertanze (1837), Fantasy in C (1836), Children’s Scenes (which contains his best known piece –Traumeri (Dreams)), Kreisleriana and his first two Piano Sonatas. The marriage to Clara in 1840 seemingly stabilized his character; he became a family man –eventually fathering seven children. During the first few years of the 1840s he had a period of enormous productivity that produced dozens of his most famous songs including the cycles Dichterliebe, Frauenliebe und Leben (A Woman’s Life and Love), Symphony # 1 Spring, the celebrated Piano Concerto in A Minor, his Piano Quartet and Quintets in E Flat, Three String Quartets and an oratorio, Paradise und die Peri.
In 1843 his friend, the already world-famous Felix Mendelssohn, asked him to teach piano composition at a new music conservatory in Leipzig that Mendelssohn headed. Clara Schumann was now a celebrated piano virtuoso who had far more fame then her husband. He accompanied her on a tour of Russia in 1844 and upon its completion they moved to Dresden. The manic creative pace that Schumann set a few years earlier abated and he seemingly fell into a deep depression in 1845 that was accompanied by auditory hallucinations. With the completion of Symphony # 2 in C, he seemed to improve although the trumpet fanfare that dominates the work was inspired by one of the auditory hallucinations.
A year later he completed his Piano Trio and started work on his only opera, Genoveva, which, despite having a lot of beautiful music, has never been performed on stage because of a poor libretto. He also, in the late 1840s, held a position as a choir director in Dresden (it must have been galling that his younger rival Richard Wagner had a far more prestigious position as the Director of the Dresden Court Opera). During his period as a choral director he produced two superb choral works that are too-little known; Scenes from Goethe’s Faust and incidental music for Byron’s Manfred.
In 1850, Schumann accepted a position as a music director in Düsseldorf. Initially the job agreed with him and he soon wrote his Third Symphony Rhenish and a revised edition of a Symphony 4 in D minor that was to become his most popular symphony. Also from this time comes his Two Violin Sonatas and his Cello Concerto along with other works. Schumann was not a very good conductor and his musical leadership started getting mixed reviews –which led to another severe depression. The only solace he received during this period was meeting the twenty-year-old Johannes Brahms in 1853.
Schumann immediately hailed Brahms a genius and he was taken into the Schumann household. Except for his Mass and Requiem, there is little music from late 1852 and 1853. His last important work was a Violin Concerto in D Minor written for Brahms’ friend, the great violinist Joseph Joachim. Joachim, however, felt that the work was a morbid product of Schumann’s insanity and it was locked away – never performed until 1937. Schumann’s condition continued to deteriorate and early in 1854 he jumped into the Rhine River and was rescued by passing workmen. Schuman was sent to a mental hospital in Bonn where he eventually lost his faculties and died on July 29th, 1856. It is not known for certain, but the rapidity and severity of his paralysis suggest that Schumann probably had tertiary syphilis.
Schumann has always been the quintessential Romantic composer. His linking of literature and poetry with music –the literary content often providing a musical idea or suggesting a pictorial element all mark him as a spiritual brother of the poets John Keats, Lord Byron and Heine. Schumann has occasionally received criticism that some of his orchestral music was not well-orchestrated and can sometimes sounds merely like inflated piano music. It is true that his big sonata forms works don’t have the architectural splendor of Beethoven or Brahms, but there is enough beauty within them to compensate for those flaws. His piano music and the finest of his songs seal his reputation as a great composer and his excellent musical criticism remains important to this day. Schumann had a uniquely tragic life but left a great legacy of beauty heard in the performances of pianists like Cortot, Kempff, Arrau, Richter, Horowitz, Rubinstein and Brendel as well the work of conductors such as Walter, Furtwangler, Szell and Bernstein and of course in the beautiful vocal performances of Dietrich Fischer-Deskau.
