Robert Schumann, the composer who split himself in two and left both halves in the music

Robert Schumann

Photo: Williamtosun / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	June 8, 1810 Zwickau, Germany
Died	July 29, 1856 (46)
Occupation	Composer

There are composers who write for the concert hall and composers who write for the room. Robert Schumann wrote for something smaller than either — for the interior space where feeling becomes too dense for language, where a single piano can hold more than an orchestra, where the act of listening and the act of thinking are the same thing. That ambition produced some of the most searching music of the nineteenth century. It also made the stage feel like the wrong arena, the public persona feel like an ill-fitting costume, and eventually the world feel unendurable.

His mental architecture was unusually crowded from the start. Schumann developed two literary alter egos — Florestan, whose temperament was wild, impetuous, and extroverted, and Eusebius, who was quiet, inward, and melancholy — and deployed them for years in his music criticism before he built them into his compositions. They were not rhetorical devices; they were functioning perspectives. Carnaval, the sequence of twenty-one character pieces that remains among his most-performed piano works, contains a movement for each. What sounds in performance like theatrical wit is actually a composer trying to map his own divided self onto the keyboard, figure by figure, mask by mask.

He was born in Zwickau, a small commercial town in the Kingdom of Saxony, in 1810. His father, a bookseller and publisher with genuine literary ambitions, gave him access to Jean Paul Richter and E.T.A. Hoffmann before he gave him access to much music, and the literary mind he developed in that household never fully separated from the musical one. By the time he arrived in Leipzig to study law at nineteen, the pretense had dissolved. He was practicing piano through most of the hours he should have been in lecture rooms, studying under Friedrich Wieck — regarded as one of the finest pedagogy teachers in German music — and producing his first mature compositions. Wieck recognized that Schumann had exceptional musical intelligence. He was less sure about the discipline, and he was right to have doubts.

The injury that ended his performing ambitions has been contested ever since it occurred. Schumann damaged the fourth finger of his right hand — either through a mechanical device he constructed to train fingers independently of one another, or through the neurotoxic effects of mercury, then used as a treatment for syphilis, or possibly some combination of both. He pursued remedies through electricity, homeopathy, and conventional medicine; none of them worked. By 1832 he acknowledged that a career as a virtuoso pianist was no longer possible. He was twenty-two. The music had to find another route.

It found several, almost simultaneously. Through the 1830s Schumann produced a sequence of piano works whose originality was without precedent in the form. Papillons, his first fully realized piece, drew on Jean Paul’s novel Flegeljahre to create a suite of short dance scenes that oscillate between festivity and loss without settling into either. Kreisleriana took Hoffmann’s fictional tormented musician Kapellmeister Kreisler — a character Schumann recognized as a version of himself — and made a psychological portrait in eight movements, each one different in character, none of them settled. The Fantasie in C major, composed partly as a tribute to Beethoven and partly as a suppressed declaration of love to Clara Wieck, packed grief and longing into a formal structure large enough to contain them both. These were not showpieces for the salon. They were acts of self-disclosure in the one medium where disclosure cost him nothing.

He also founded, in 1834, the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, a journal whose stated purpose was to combat what Schumann saw as the mediocrity, shallow virtuosity, and critical corruption dominating German musical culture. Writing under the names Florestan, Eusebius, and other pseudonyms, together with a circle of friends he called the Davidsbündler — the League of David, named for the biblical fighter against Philistines — Schumann became the most consequential music critic of his generation. He was among the first to recognize the significance of Chopin. Decades later, in 1853, in one of the last pieces of prose he would write before his breakdown, he published “Neue Bahnen” (New Paths), announcing the twenty-year-old Johannes Brahms as the heir to everything the Romantic tradition had been building toward. The judgment was correct, and Schumann knew it would be his last major critical act.

The year 1840 transformed his domestic life. After four years of legal battles against Friedrich Wieck — who refused consent to his daughter’s marriage, accused Schumann of alcoholism and financial irresponsibility, and attempted to have Clara declared legally incompetent to make the decision herself — a court finally granted the couple permission to wed. Schumann married Clara Wieck on 12 September 1840, the day before her twenty-first birthday. That same year he composed approximately 140 songs in a sustained outpouring historians still call his Liederjahr, the year of song. Dichterliebe, settings of sixteen Heine poems about love, memory, and loss, moves through grief not chronologically but emotionally, following the logic of how feeling actually works rather than how narrative would prefer it to. Frauenliebe und -leben, settings of Adelbert von Chamisso’s cycle about a woman’s interior life from first love to widowhood, is the most contested of his major works: later readers have found its model of devoted femininity troubling in ways Schumann clearly did not intend, and the gap between the music’s precision and the poetry’s ideology remains unresolved. As music, it is devastating.

The 1840s brought expansion and complication in equal measure: seven children, Clara’s demanding concert schedule, Schumann’s ambitious attempts to extend beyond piano music into symphonic and choral forms. His four symphonies, composed across the decade, show a composer straining productively against the limitations of a form he came to relatively late. The Symphony No. 1 in B-flat — the Spring Symphony, named with characteristic optimism after its premiere under Mendelssohn’s baton in 1841 — has a first movement that releases pent-up energy on a scale the piano cannot accommodate. The Symphony No. 3, the Rhenish, sketched during 1850 after the Schumanns moved to Düsseldorf, draws on the landscape and ceremonial weight of the Rhine valley — a river he would later stand above contemplating a different kind of crossing.

Schumann’s orchestration has been a critical battlefield for a century and a half. Mahler, Weingartner, and others prepared revised versions of his symphonies, arguing that the original scores were muddy, that doublings obscured inner voices, that the textures were incompletely realized by a composer whose natural instrument was the piano and who never fully internalized the orchestra’s possibilities. The argument is not groundless — there are moments, particularly in the slow movements, where Schumann’s doubling across sections does produce a density that compresses rather than opens the harmony. But the revised orchestrations tend to produce music that is cleaner and less specifically Schumann: the roughness and the identity are not entirely separable. His orchestral scores sound like a particular person trying to say something particular, which is itself a rare quality, and not one that every editorial revision manages to preserve.

There is also the question of what he withheld or what was withheld from him. The Violin Concerto he composed for Joseph Joachim in 1853 — during the last months before his breakdown, when the deterioration was already audible to those around him — was suppressed for over eighty years, partly at Joachim’s request. When it was finally published in 1937, it turned out to be a searching, strange work that sounds unlike anything else in his output: long-breathed, harmonically uncertain, with a slow movement of unusual plainness. Its otherness may not be evidence of decline so much as evidence of where he was going before he could no longer go anywhere.

On 27 February 1854, Schumann walked from his house in Düsseldorf to a bridge over the Rhine and jumped. Fishermen pulled him out. Four days later, at his own request, he was admitted to a private sanatorium at Endenich, near Bonn. The director of the facility did not permit family contact. Clara, who was pregnant with their eighth child, received reports and letters for more than two years without being allowed to see him. Brahms visited, supported Clara, and waited. On 27 July 1856 Clara was finally admitted. Her husband died two days later, on 29 July. He was forty-six. The official cause was pneumonia. The underlying condition — whether syphilitic dementia, a bipolar spectrum disorder, or something else — remains unresolved and perhaps unresolvable from the surviving evidence.

What he left behind is a body of piano music that argues, piece by piece, that the most important things happen at small scale — between two hands on a keyboard, between a composer and a listener who may be the same person. Kinderszenen, the thirteen pieces for solo piano that take perhaps twenty minutes in uninterrupted performance, makes the argument in its most compressed form: music notionally about childhood and memory that is, without announcement, also music about how the past persists inside the present, rewriting what we think we remember. Pianists still find it difficult to play without feeling they are reading someone’s private correspondence. More than a hundred and sixty years after his death, that impression has not diminished — which is the strangest thing about a composer so constitutionally unsuited to the public world: that he found, in the most public of art forms, the most private voice of his century.

Tags: singers, Carnaval, Clara Schumann, classical composers, Dichterliebe, Johannes Brahms

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