Robert Schumann shares with Weber the honor of giving the earliest
impulse to what may be called the romantic school of music, which has
culminated in the operatic creations of Richard Wagner. Greatly to the
gain of the world, his early aspirations as a mere player were crushed
by the too intense zeal through which he attempted to perfect his
manipulation, the mechanical contrivance he used having had the
effect of paralyzing the muscular power of one of his hands. But this
department of art work was nobly borne by his gifted wife, _nee_ Clara
Wieck, and Schumann concentrated his musical ambition in the higher
field of composition, leaving behind him works not only remarkable for
beauty of form, but for poetic richness of thought and imagination.
Schumann composed songs, cantatas, operas, and symphonies, but it is in
his works for the piano-forte that his idiosyncrasy was most strikingly
embodied, and in which he has bequeathed the most precious inheritance
to the world of art. All his powers were swept impetuously into one
current, the poetic side of art, and alike as critic and composer he
stands in a relation to the music of the pianoforte which places him on
a pinnacle only less lofty than that of Beethoven.
Robert Schumann was born in the small Saxon town of Zwickau in the
year 1810, and was designed by his father, a publisher and author
of considerable reputation, for the profession of the law. The elder
Schumann, though a man of talent and culture, had a deep distaste for
his son's clearly displayed tendencies to music, and though he permitted
him to study something of the science in the usual school-boy way (for
music has always been a part of the educational course in Germany), he
discouraged in every way Robert's passion. The boy had quickly become a
clever player, and even at the age of eight had begun to put his ideas
on paper. We are told by his biographers that he was accustomed
to extemporize at school, and had such a knack in portraying the
characteristics of his school-fellows in music as to make his purpose
instantly recognizable. His father died when Schumann was only
seventeen, and his mother, who was also bent on her son becoming a
jurist, became his guardian. It was a severe battle between taste
and duty, but love for his widowed mother conquered, and young Robert
Schumann entered the University of Leipzig as a law student. It was with
a feeling almost of despair that he wrote at this time, "I have decided
upon law as my profession, and will work at it industriously, however
cold and dry the beginning may be." Previously, however, he had spent a
year in the household of Frederick Wieck, the distinguished teacher of
music. So much he had exacted before succumbing to maternal pleading.
At this time he first made the acquaintance of a charming and precocious
child, Clara Wieck, who played such an important part in his future
life.
Robert Schumann's law studies were inexpressibly tedious to him, and so
he told his sympathetic professor, the learned Thibaut, author of the
treatise "On the Purity of Music," in a characteristic manner. He went
to the piano and played Weber's "Invitation to the Waltz," commenting on
the different passages: "Now she speaks--that's the love prattle; now
he speaks--that's the man's earnest voice; now both the lovers speak
together "; concluding with the remark, "Isn't all that better far than
anything that jurisprudence can utter?" The young student became quite
popular in society as a pianist, heard Ernst and Paganini for the first
time, and composed several works, among them the Toccata in D major.
The genius for music would come to the fore in spite of jurisprudence.
A vacation trip to Italy which the young man made gave fresh fuel to
the flame, and he began to write the most passionate pleas to his
mother that she should con sent to his adoption of a musical career. The
distressed woman wrote to Wieck to know what he thought, and the answer
was favorable to Robert's aspirations. Robert was intoxicated with his
mother's concession, and he poured out his enthusiasm to Wieck: "Take
me as I am, and, above all, bear with me. No blame shall depress me, no
praise make me idle. Pails upon pails of very cold theory can not hurt
me, and I will work at it without the least murmur."
Taking lodgings at the house of Wieck, Schumann devoted himself to
piano-forte playing with intense ardor; but his zeal outran prudence.
To hasten his proficiency and acquire an independent action for each
finger, he contrived a mechanical apparatus which held the third
finger of the right hand immovable, while the others went through their
evolutions. The result was such a lameness of the hand that it was
incurable, and young Schumann's career as a virtuoso was for ever
checked. His deep sorrow, however, did not unman him long, for he turned
his attention to the study of composition and counterpoint under Kupsch,
and, afterward, Heinrich Dorn. He remained for three years under Wieck's
roof, and the companionship of the child Clara, whose marvelous musical
powers were the talk of Leipzig, was a sweet consolation to him in his
troubles and his toil, though ten years his junior. The love, which
became a part of his life, had already begun to flutter into unconscious
being in his feeling for a shy and reserved little girl.
Schumann tells us that the year 1834 was the most important one of his
life, for it witnessed the birth of the "N'eue Zeitschrift fur Musik,"
a journal which was to embody his notions of ideal music, and to be the
organ of a clique of enthusiasts in lifting the art out of Philistinism
and commonplace. The war-cry was "Reform in art," and never-ending
battle against the little and conventional ideas which were believed
then to be the curse of German music. Among the earlier contributors
were Wieck, Schumke, Knorr, Banck, and Schumann himself, who wrote
under the pseudonyms Florestan and Eusebius. Between his new journal and
composing, Schumann was kept busy, but he found time to persuade himself
that he was in love with Frâulein Ernestine von Fricken, a beautiful but
somewhat frivolous damsel, who became engaged to the young composer and
editor. Two years cooled off this passion, and a separation was mutually
agreed on. Perhaps Schumann recognized something, in the lovely child
who was swiftly blooming into maidenhood, which made his own inner soul
protest against any other attachment.