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Robert Schumann[n 1] (German: [ˈʁoːbɛʁt ˈʃuːman]; 8 June 1810 – 29 July 1856) was a German composer, pianist, and music critic of the Romantic era. He left the study of law, intending to pursue a career as a virtuoso pianist. His piano teacher, Friedrich Wieck, had assured him that he could become the finest pianist in Europe, but a hand injury ended this ambition. Schumann then focused his musical energies on composing. In 1840 Schumann married Friedrich Wieck's daughter Clara Wieck, after a long and acrimonious legal battle with Wieck, who opposed the marriage. A lifelong partnership in music began, as Clara herself was an established pianist and music prodigy. Clara and Robert developed a close relationship with the composer Johannes Brahms.

Until 1840 Schumann wrote exclusively for the piano. Later, he composed piano and orchestral works, and many Lieder (songs for voice and piano). He composed four symphonies, one opera, and other orchestral, choral, and chamber works. His best-known works include Carnaval, Symphonic Studies, Kinderszenen, Kreisleriana, and the Fantasie in C. Schumann was known for infusing his music with characters through motifs, as well as references to works of literature. These characters bled into his editorial writing in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (New Journal for Music), a Leipzig-based publication that he co-founded.

Schumann suffered from a mental disorder that first manifested in 1833 as a severe melancholic depressive episode – which recurred several times alternating with phases of "exaltation" and increasingly also delusional ideas of being poisoned or threatened with metallic items. What is now thought to have been a combination of bipolar disorder and perhaps mercury poisoning led to "manic" and "depressive" periods in Schumann's compositional productivity. After a suicide attempt in 1854, Schumann was admitted at his own request to a mental asylum in Endenich (now in Bonn). Diagnosed with psychotic melancholia, he died of pneumonia two years later at the age of 46, without recovering from his mental illness.

Life and career[edit]

Childhood[edit]

Exterior of substantial town house seen from the square outside it
Schumann's birth house, now the Robert Schumann House, after an anonymous colourised lithograph

Robert Schumann[n 1] was born in Zwickau, in the Kingdom of Saxony (today the state of Saxony), into an affluent middle class family.[4] On 13 June 1830 the local newspaper, the Zwickauer Wochenblatt (Zwickau Weekly Paper), carried the announcement, "On 8 June to Herr August Schumann, notable citizen and bookseller here, a little son".[5] He was the fifth and last child of August Schumann and his wife, Johanna Christiane (née Schnabel). August, not only a bookseller but also a lexicographer, author and publisher of chivalric romances, made considerable sums from his German translations of writers such as Cervantes, Walter Scott and Lord Byron.[2] Robert, his favourite child, was able to spend many hours exploring the classics of literature in his father's collection.[2] Intermittently, between the ages of three and five-and-a-half, he was placed with foster parents, as his mother had contracted typhus.[4]

At the age of six Schumann went to a private preparatory school, where he remained for four years.[6] When he was seven he began studying general music and piano with the local organist, Johann Gottfried Kuntsch, and for a time he also had cello and flute lessons with one of the municipal musicians, Carl Gottlieb Meissner.[7] Throughout his childhood and youth his love of music and literature ran in tandem, with poems and dramatic works produced alongside small-scale compositions, mainly piano pieces and songs.[8] He was not a musical child prodigy like Mozart or Mendelssohn,[4] but his talent as a pianist was evident from an early age: in 1850 the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (Universal Musical Journal) printed a biographical sketch of Schumann which included an account from contemporary sources that even as a boy he possessed a special talent for portraying feelings and characteristic traits in melody:

Indeed, he could sketch the different dispositions of his intimate friends by certain figures and passages on the piano so exactly and comically that everyone burst into loud laughter at the accuracy of the portrait.[9]

From 1820 Schumann attended the Zwickau Lyceum, the local high school of about two hundred boys, where he remained till the age of eighteen, studying a traditional curriculum. In addition to his studies he read extensively: among his early enthusiasms were Schiller and Jean Paul.[10] According to the musical historian George Hall, Paul remained Schumann's favourite author and exercised a powerful influence on the composer's creativity with his sensibility and vein of fantasy.[8] Musically, Schumann got to know the works of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and of living composers Weber, with whom August Schumann tried unsuccessfully to arrange for Robert to study.[8] August was not particularly musical but he encouraged his son's interest in music, buying him a Streicher grand piano and organising expeditions to Leipzig for a performance of Die Zauberflöte and Carlsbad to hear the celebrated pianist Ignaz Moscheles.[11]

miniature oil painting of a young, clean-shaven white youth in early-19th-century costume
Schumann c. 1826

University[edit]

August Schumann died in 1826; his widow was less enthusiastic about a musical career for her son and persuaded him to study for the law as a profession. After his final examinations at the Lyceum in March 1828 he entered Leipzig University. Accounts differ about his diligence as a law student. According to his room-mate Emil Flechsig, he never set foot in a lecture hall,[2] but he himself recorded, "I am industrious and regular, and enjoy my jurisprudence ... and am only now beginning to appreciate its true worth".[12] Nonetheless reading and playing the piano occupied a good deal of his time, and he developed expensive tastes for champagne and cigars.[8] Musically, he discovered the works of Franz Schubert, whose death in November 1828 caused Schumann to cry all night.[8] The leading piano teacher in Leipzig was Friedrich Wieck, who recognised Schumann's talent and accepted him as a pupil.[13]

After a year in Leipzig Schumann convinced his mother that he should move to join his old friend Eduard Röller at the University of Heidelberg which, unlike Leipzig, offered courses in Roman, ecclesiastical and international law. After matriculating at the university on 30 July 1829 he travelled to Switzerland and Italy from late August to late October. He was highly taken with Rossini's operas and the bel canto of the soprano Giuditta Pasta; he wrote to Wieck, "one can have no notion of Italian music without hearing it under Italian skies".[2] Another influence on him was hearing the violin virtuoso Niccolò Paganini play in Frankfurt in April 1830.[14] Finally deciding in favour of music rather than the law as a career he wrote to his mother on 30 July 1830 telling her how he saw his direction in life: "My entire life has been a twenty-year struggle between poetry and prose, or call it music and law".[15] He persuaded her to ask Wieck for an objective assessment of his musical potential. Wieck's verdict was that with the necessary hard work Schumann could become a leading pianist within three years. A six-month trial period was agreed.[16]

1830–183?[edit]

musical score for solo piano piece
Opening of Schumann's Op. 1, the Abegg Variations

Later in 1830 Schumann published his Op. 1, a set of piano variations on a theme based on the name of its supposed dedicatee, Countess Pauline von Abegg (who was almost certainly a figment of Schumann's imagination).[17] The notes A-B-E-G-G, played in waltz tempo, make up the theme on which the variations are based.[18] The use of a musical cipher became a recurrent characteristic of Schumann's later music.[8] 1831 he began lessons in harmony and counterpoint with Heinrich Dorn, musical director of the Saxon court theatre,[19] and in 1832 he published his Op. 2, Papillons (Butterflies) for piano, a programmatic piece depicting twin brothers – one a poetic dreamer, the other a worldly realist – both in love with the same woman at a masked ball.[20]

Schumann's pianistic ambitions suffered a permanent setback from a debilitating weakness in the middle finger of his right hand. The early symptoms came while he was still a student at Heidelberg, and the cause is uncertain.[21][n 2]

Notes, references and sources[edit]

Notes[edit]

  1. ^ a b Many sources from the 19th century onwards state that Schumann had the middle name Alexander,[1] but according to the 2001 edition of Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians and a 2005 biography by Eric Frederick Jensen there is no evidence that he had a middle name and it is possibly a misreading of his teenage pseudonym "Skülander". His birth and death certificates and all other existing official documents give "Robert Schumann" as his only names.[2][3]
  2. ^ Wieck believed the damage was done by Schumann's use of a chiroplast – a finger-stretching device then favoured by pianists; the biographer Eric Sams has theorised that the affliction was caused by mercury poisoning as a side effect of treatment for syphilis, a hypothesis subsequently discounted by neurologists.[21]

References[edit]

  1. ^ Liliencron, p. 44; Spitta, p. 384 and Wolff p. 1702
  2. ^ a b c d e Daverio, John and Eric Sams. "Schumann, Robert", Grove Music Online, Oxford University Press, 2001 (subscription required)
  3. ^ Jensen, p. 2
  4. ^ a b c Perrey, p. 6
  5. ^ Dowley, p. 7
  6. ^ Chissell, p. 3
  7. ^ Geck, p. 8
  8. ^ a b c d e f Hall, p. 1125
  9. ^ Wasielewski, p. 11
  10. ^ Geck, p. 49
  11. ^ Chissell, p. 4
  12. ^ Chissell, p. 16
  13. ^ Jensen, p. 22
  14. ^ Taylor, p. 58
  15. ^ Jensen, p. 34
  16. ^ Jensen, p. 37
  17. ^ Geck, p. 62; and Jensen, p. 97
  18. ^ Taylor, p. 72
  19. ^ Jensen, p. 64
  20. ^ Taylor, p. 74
  21. ^ a b Ostwald, pp. 23 and 25

Sources[edit]

  • Chissell, Joan (1989). Schumann (Fifth ed.). London: Dent. ISBN 978-0-46-012588-8.
  • Dowley, Tim (1982). Schumann: His Life and Times. Neptune City: Paganiniana. ISBN 978-0-87-666634-0.
  • Geck, Martin (2013) [2010]. Robert Schumann: The Life and Work of a Romantic Composer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-22-628469-9.
  • Hall, George (2002). "Robert Schumann". In Alison Latham (ed.). The Oxford Companion to Music. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-866212-9.
  • Jensen, Eric Frederick (2005). Schumann. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-983068-8.
  • Liliencron, Rochus von (1875). Allgemeine deutsche Biographie (in German). Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot. OCLC 311366924.
  • Ostwald, Peter (Summer 1980). "Florestan, Eusebius, Clara, and Schumann's Right Hand". 19th-Century Music: 17–31. (subscription required)
  • Perrey, Beate (2007). "Schumann's lives, and afterlives". In Beate Perrey (ed.). Cambridge Companion to Schumann. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-139-00154-0.
  • Spitta, Philipp (1879). "Schumann, Robert". In George Grove (ed.). A Dictionary of Music and Musicians. London and New York: Macmillan. OCLC 1043255406.
  • Taylor, Ronald (1985) [1982]. Robert Schumann: His Life and Work. London: Panther. ISBN 978-0-58-605883-1.
  • Wasielewski, Wilhelm Joseph von (1869). Robert Schumann: eine Biographie (in German). Dresden: Kuntze. OCLC 492828443.
  • Wolff, Anita, ed. (2006). Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Chicago: Britannica. ISBN 978-1-59339-492-9.
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