profession, and who, at the age of sixty-nine, still continues to be
among the most fascinating of pianists, placed the musical world under
additional obligations when she issued three years ago the collection
of private letters, written by Schumann between the ages of eighteen
and thirty (1827-40), partly to her, partly to his mother, and other
relatives, friends, and business associates. She was prompted to this
act not only by the consciousness that there are many literary gems in
the correspondence which should not be lost to the world, but by the
thought that more is generally known of Schumann's eccentricities than
of his real traits of character. Inasmuch as a wretched script was one
of the most conspicuous of these eccentricities, it is fortunate that
his wife lived to edit his letters; but even she, though familiar with
his handwriting during many years of courtship and marriage, was not
infrequently obliged to interpolate a conjectural word. Schumann had
a genuine vein of humor, which he reveals in his correspondence as in
his compositions and criticisms. He was aware that his manuscript was
not a model of caligraphy, but, on being remonstrated with, he
passionately declared he could not do any better, promising, however,
sarcastically that, as a predestined diplomat, he would keep an
amanuensis in future. And on page 245 begins a long letter to Clara
which presents a curious appearance. Every twentieth word or so is
placed between two vertical lines, regarding which the reader is kept
in the dark until he comes to this postscript: "In great haste, owing
to business affairs, I add a sort of lexicon of indistinctly written
words, which I have placed within brackets. This will probably make
the letter appear very picturesque and piquant. The idea is not so
bad. Adio, clarissima Cara, cara Clarissima." Then follows the
"lexicon" of twenty words, including his own signature.
Although, in a semi-humorous vein, Schumann repeatedly alludes in
these letters to the "foregone conclusion" that they will some day be
printed, there is hardly any indication that such a thought was ever
in his mind while writing them. They are, in fact, full of confidences
and confessions, some of which he could not have been very ambitious
to see in print; such as his frequent appeals for "more ducats,"
during his student days, and his sophistically ingenious excuses for
needing so much money, placed side by side with his frank admission
that he had no talent for economy, and was very fond of cigars, wine,
and especially travelling. In one of the most amusing of the letters,
he advances twelve reasons why his mother should send him about $200
to enable him to see Switzerland and Italy. As a last, convincing
argument, he gently hints that it is very easy for a student in
Heidelberg to borrow money at 10 per cent. interest. He got the money
and enjoyed his Swiss tour, mostly on foot and alone; but in Italy
various misfortunes overtook him--he fell ill, his money ran out, and
he was only too glad to return to Heidelberg in the same condition as
when he had first arrived there, on which occasion the state of his
purse compelled him to make the last part of the journey from Leipsic
on foot.
On this trip he enjoyed that unique emotional thrill of the German,
the first sight of the Rhine, with which he was so enchanted that he
went to the extreme forward end of the deck, smoking a good cigar
given him by an Englishman: "Thus I sat alone all the afternoon,
revelling in the wild storm which ploughed through my hair, and
composing a poem of praise to the Northeast wind"--for Schumann often
indulged in poetic efforts, especially when inspired to flights of
fancy by his favorite author, Jean Paul.
At Heidelberg, which he called "ein ganzes Paradies von Natur," he
spent one of the happiest years of his life. Student life at this town
he thus compares with Leipsic:
"In and near Heidelberg the student is the most prominent and
respected individual, since it is he who supports the town, so that
the citizens and Philistines are naturally excessively courteous. I
consider it a disadvantage for a young man, especially for a student,
to live in a town where the student only and solely rules and
flourishes. Repression alone favors the free development of a youth,
and the everlasting loafing with students greatly limits
many-sidedness of thought, and consequently exerts a bad influence on
practical life. This is one great advantage Leipsic has over
Heidelberg--which, in fact, a large city always has over a small
one.... On the other hand, Heidelberg has this advantage, that the
grandeur and beauty of the natural scenery prevent the students from
spending so much of their time in drinking; for which reason the
students here are ten times more sober than in Leipsic."
Schumann himself, as we have said, was fond of a glass of good wine.
On his first journey, at Prague, he tells us, the Tokay made him
happy. And in another place he exclaims, "Every day I should like to
drink champagne to excite myself." But, though of a solitary
disposition, he did not care to drink alone, for "only in the intimate
circle of sympathetic hearts does the vine's blood become transfused
into our own and warm it to enthusiasm." Schumann's special vice was
the constant smoking of very strong cigars; nor does he appear to have
devoted to gastronomic matters the attention necessary to nourish such
an abnormally active brain as his. At one time he lived on potatoes
alone for several weeks; at another he saved on his meals to get money
for French lessons; and although he took enough interest in a good
_menu_ to copy it in a letter, he repeatedly laments the time which is
uselessly wasted in eating. Such tenets, combined with his smoking
habit, doubtless helped to shatter his powers, leading finally to the
lunatic asylum and a comparatively early death.
His frequent fits of melancholy may also perhaps be traced in part to
these early habits. Though probably unacquainted with Burton, he held
that "there is in melancholy sentiments something extremely attractive
and even invigorating to the imagination." Attempts were frequently
made by his friends to teach him more sociable habits. Thus, at
Leipsic, "Dr. Carus's family are anxious to introduce me to
innumerable families--'it would be good for my prospects,' they
think, and so do I, and yet I don't get there, and in fact seldom go
out at all. Indeed, I am often very leathery, dry, disagreeable, and
laugh much inwardly." That his apparent coldness and indifference to
his neighbors and friends were due chiefly to his absorption in his
world of ideas, and his consequent want of sympathy with the
artificial usages of society, becomes apparent from this confession,
written to Clara in 1838:
"I should like to confide to you many other things regarding my
character--how people often wonder that I meet the warmest expressions
of love with coldness and reserve, and often offend and humiliate
precisely those who are most sincerely devoted to me. Often have I
queried and reproached myself for this, for inwardly I acknowledge
even the most trifling favor, understand every wink, every subtle
trait in the heart of another, and yet I so often blunder in what I
say and do."
In these melancholy moods nature was his refuge and consolation.
He objected to Leipsic because there were no delights of
nature--"everything artificially transformed; no valley, no mountain,
where I might revel in my thoughts; no place where I can be alone,
except in the bolted room, with the eternal noise and turmoil below."
Although he had but a few intimate friends, he was liked by all the
students, and even enjoyed the name of "a favorite of the Heidelberg
public." One of his intimate friends was Flechsig, but even of him he
paradoxically complains that he is too sympathetic: "He never cheers
me up; if I am occasionally in a melancholy mood, he ought not to be
the same, and he ought to have sufficient humanity to stir me up.
That I often need cheering up, I know very well." Yet he was as often
in a state of extreme happiness and enjoyment of life and his
talents. He even, on occasion, indulged in students' pranks. On his
journey to Heidelberg he induced the postilion to let him take the
reins: "Thunder! how the horses ran, and how extravagantly happy I
was, and how we stopped at every tavern to get fodder, and how I
entertained the whole company, and how sorry they all were when I
parted from them at Wiesbaden!!" At Frankfort, one morning, he
writes: "I felt an extraordinary longing to play on a piano. So I
calmly went to the nearest dealer, told him I was the tutor of a
young English lord who wished to buy a grand piano, and then I
played, to the wonder and delight of the bystanders, for three hours.
I promised to return in two days and inform them if the lord wanted
the instrument; but on that date I was at Rüdesheim, drinking
Rüdesheimer." In another place he gives an account of "a scene
worthy of Van Dyck, and a most genial evening" he spent with some
students at a tavern filled with peasants. They had some grog, and at
the request of the peasants one of the students declaimed, and
Schumann played. Then a dance was arranged. "The peasants beat time
with their feet. We were in high spirits, and danced dizzily among
the peasant feet, and finally took a touching farewell of the company
by giving all the peasant girls, Minchen, etc., smacking kisses on
the lips."
Were women, like men, afflicted with retrospective jealousy,
Schumann's widow, in editing these letters, would have received a pang
from many other passages revealing Schumann's fondness for the fair
sex. He allowed no good-looking woman to pass him on the street
without taking the opportunity to cultivate his sense of beauty. After
his engagement to Clara he gives her fair warning that he has the
"very mischievous habit" of being a great admirer of beautiful women
and girls. "They make me positively smirk, and I swim in panegyrics on
your sex. Consequently, if at some future time we walk along the
streets of Vienna and meet a beauty, and I exclaim, 'Oh, Clara! see
this heavenly vision,' or something of the sort, you must not be
alarmed nor scold me." He had a number of transient passions before he
discovered that Clara was his only true love. There was Nanni, his
"guardian angel," who saved him from the perils of the world and
hovered before his vision like a saint. "I feel like kneeling before
her and adoring her like a Madonna." But Nanni had a dangerous rival
in Liddy. Not long, however, for he found Liddy silly, cold as marble,
and--fatal defect--she could not sympathize with him regarding Jean
Paul. "The exalted image of my ideal disappears when I think of the
remarks she made about Jean Paul. Let the dead rest in peace."
Several of his flames are not alluded to in this correspondence. On
his travels he appears to have had the habit of noting down in his
diary the prevalence and peculiarities of feminine beauty. He
complains that from Mainz to Heidelberg he "did not see a single
pretty face." Yet, as a whole, the Rhine maidens seem to have won his
admiration:
"What characteristic faces among the lowest classes! On the west shore
of the Rhine the girls have very delicate features, indicating
amiability rather than intelligence; the noses are mostly Greek, the
face very oval and artistically symmetrical, the hair brown; I did not
see a single blonde. The complexion is soft, delicate, with more white
than red; melancholy rather than sanguine. The Frankfort girls, on the
other hand, have in common a sisterly trait--the character of German,
manly, sad earnestness which we often find in our quondam free
cities, and which toward the east gradually merges into a gentle
softness. Characteristic are the faces of all the Frankfort girls:
intellectual or beautiful few of them; the noses mostly Greek, often
snub-noses; the dialect I did not like."
The English type of beauty appears to have especially won his
approval. "When she spoke it sounded like the whispering of angels,"
he says of an Englishwoman, "as pretty as a picture," whom he met.
Elsewhere he says, laconically: "On the 24th I arrived at Mainz with
the steamer, in company with twenty to thirty English men and women.
Next day the number of English increased to fifty. If I ever marry, it
must be an English woman." Some years later, however, with the
fickleness of genius, he writes about Ernestine, the daughter of a
rich Bohemian Baron, "a delightfully innocent, childish soul, tender
and pensive, attached to me and to everything artistic by the most
sincere love, extremely musical--in short, just the kind of a girl I
could wish to marry." He did become engaged to her, but the following
year the engagement was dissolved; and soon after this he discovered
that his artistic admiration for Clara Wieck had assumed the form of
love. Although her father opposed their union several years, on
account of Schumann's poverty, the young couple often met, and not
only in the music-room. In 1833 he writes to his mother regarding
Clara: "The other day, when we went to Connewitz (we take a two or
three hours' walk almost daily), I heard her say to herself, 'How
happy I am! how happy!' Who would not like to hear that! On this road
there are a number of very useless stones in the midst of the
footpath. Now, as it happens in conversation that I more frequently
look up than down, she always walks behind me and gently pulls my coat
at every stone, lest I may fall."
It was most fortunate for Schumann that his bride and wife was one of
the greatest living pianists. For, owing to the accident to his hand,
though he could still improvise, he could not appear in public to
interpret his own compositions, which depended so much for their
success on a sympathetic performance, since they differed so greatly
from the prevalent style of Hummel and the classical masters, that
even so gifted a musician as Mendelssohn failed to understand them.
But Clara made it the task of her life to secure him recognition, and
this was an additional bond that united their souls. "When you are
mine," he writes, "you will occasionally hear something new from me; I
believe you will often inspire me, and the mere fact that I shall then
frequently hear my own compositions will cheer me up;" and: "Your
Romance showed me once more that we must become man and wife. Every
one of your thoughts comes from my soul, even as I owe all my music
to you." To Dorn he writes that many of his compositions, including
the Noveletten, the Kreisleriana, and the Kinderscenen, were inspired
by Clara; and it is well known that his love became the incentive to
the composition, in one year, of over a hundred wonderful songs--his
previous compositions, up to 1840, having all been for the piano
alone. In the last letter of this collection he says: "Sometimes it
appears to me as if I were treading entirely new paths in music;" and
there are many other passages showing that he realized well that the
very things which his contemporaries criticised and decried as
eccentric and obscure (Hummel, _e.g._, objects to his frequent changes
of harmony and his originality!), were really his most inspired
efforts. Though he never allowed the desire for popularity to
influence his work, yet he occasionally craves appreciation. "I am
willing to confess that I should be greatly pleased if I could succeed
in composing something which would impel the public, after hearing you
play it, to run against the walls in their delight; for vain we
composers are, even though we have no reason to be so." It must have
given him a strange shock when an amateur asked him, at one of his
wife's concerts in Vienna, if he also was musical!
In her efforts to win appreciation for her husband, Clara was nobly
assisted by Liszt. Just like Wagner, Schumann was not at first very
favorably impressed with Liszt, owing to the sensational flavor of his
early performances. But he soon changed his mind, especially when
Liszt played some of his (Schumann's) compositions. "Many things were
different from my conception of them, but always '_genial_,' and
marked by a tenderness and boldness of expression which even he
presumably has not at his command every day. Becker was the only other
person present, and he had tears in his eyes." And two days later:
"But I must tell you that Liszt appears to me grander every day. This
morning he again played at Raimund Härtel's, in a way to make us all
tremble and rejoice, some études of Chopin, a number of the Rossini
soirées, and other things." Of other contemporary pianists Hummel,
"ten years behind the time," and Thalberg, whom he liked better as
pianist than as composer, are alluded to. Yet he writes in 1830 that
he intends going to Weimar, "for the sly reason of being able to _call
myself_ a pupil of Hummel." Wieck, his father-in-law, he esteemed
greatly as teacher and adviser, but it offended him deeply that Wieck
should have followed the common error of estimating genius with a
yard-stick, and asked where were his "Don Juan" and his "Freischütz?"
His enthusiasm for Schubert, Chopin, and especially for Bach, finds
frequent expression. Bach's "Well-Tempered Clavichord" he declares is
his "grammar, and the best of all grammars. The fugues I have
analyzed successively to the minutest details; the advantage resulting
from this is great, and has a morally bracing effect on the whole
system, for Bach was a man through and through; in him there is
nothing done by halves, nothing morbid, but all is written for time
eternal." Six years later: "Bach is my daily bread; from him I derive
gratification and get new ideas--'compared with him we are all
children,' Beethoven has said, I believe." One day a caller remarked
that Bach was old and wrote in old-fashioned manner: "But I told him
he was neither old nor new, but much more than that, namely, eternal.
I came near losing my temper." Concerning the unappreciative
Mendelssohn, he writes to Clara:
"I am told that he is not well disposed toward me. I should feel sorry
if that were true, since I am conscious of having preserved noble
sentiments toward him. If you know anything let me hear it on
occasion; that will at least make me cautious, and I do not wish to
squander anything where I am ill-spoken of. Concerning my relations
toward him as a musician [1838], I am quite aware that I could learn
of him for years; but he, too, some things of me. Brought up under
similar circumstances, destined for music from childhood, I would
surpass you all--that I feel from the energy of my inventive powers."
Concerning this energy he says, some time after this, when he had
just finished a dozen songs: "Again I have composed so much that I am
sometimes visited by a mysterious feeling. Alas! I cannot help it. I
could wish to sing myself to death, like a nightingale."
One of the most interesting bits of information contained in this
correspondence is that, when quite a young man, Schumann commenced a
treatise on musical æsthetics. In view of the many epoch-making
thoughts contained in his two volumes of collected criticisms, it is
very much to be regretted that this plan was not carried out. On one
question of musical psychology light is thrown by several of these
letters. Like many other composers, it seems that Schumann often, if
not generally, had some pictorial image or event in his mind in
composing. "When I composed my first songs," he writes to Clara, "I
was entirely within you. Without such a bride one cannot write such
music." "I am affected by everything that goes on in the
world--politics, literature, mankind. In my own manner I meditate on
everything, which then seeks utterance in music. That is why many of
my compositions are so difficult to understand, because they relate to
remote affairs; and often significant, because all that's remarkable
in our time affects me, and I have to give it expression in musical
language." One of the letters to Clara begins: "Tell me what the first
part of the Fantasia suggests to you. Does it not bring many pictures
before your mind?" Concerning the "Phantasiestücke" he writes: "When
they were finished I was delighted to find the story of Hero and
Leander in them.... Tell me if you, too, find this picture fitting the
music." "The Papillons," he says once more, are intended to be a
musical translation of the final scene in Jean Paul's "Flegeljahre."
Believers in telepathy will be interested in the following additional
instance of composing with a visual object in mind: "I wrote to you
concerning a presentiment; it occurred to me on the days from March
24th to 27th, when I was at work on my new composition. There is a
place in it to which I constantly recurred; it is as if some one
sighed, 'Ach, Gott!' from the bottom of his heart. While composing, I
constantly saw funeral processions, coffins, unhappy people in
despair; and when I had finished, and long searched for a title, the
word 'corpse-fantasia' continually obtruded itself. Is not that
remarkable? During the composition, moreover, I was often so deeply
affected that tears came to my eyes, and yet I knew not why and had no
reason--till Theresa's letter arrived, which made everything clear."
His brother was on his death-bed.
* * * * *
The collection of Schumann's letters so far under consideration met
with such a favorable reception that a second edition was soon called
for, and this circumstance no doubt promoted the publication of a
second series, extending to 1854, two years before Schumann's sad
death in the lunatic asylum near Bonn. This second volume includes a
considerable number of business letters to his several publishers. In
one of these he confides to Dr. Härtel his plan of collecting and
revising his musical criticisms, and publishing them in two volumes.
But as this letter was, a few months later, followed by a similar one
addressed to the publisher Wigand, who subsequently printed the
essays, it is to be inferred that Breitkopf & Härtel, though assured
of the future of Schumann's compositions, doubted the financial value
of his musical essays--an attitude pardonable at a time when there was
still a ludicrous popular prejudice against literary utterances by a
musician. In 1883, however, after Wigand had issued a third edition of
the "Collected Writings on Music and Musicians" (which have also been
translated into English by Mrs. Ritter), Breitkopf & Härtel atoned for
their error by purchasing the copyright.
Schumann's letters to his publishers show that he used to suggest his
own terms, which were commonly acceded to without protest. For his
famous quintet he asked twenty louis d'or, or about $100; for
"Paradise and the Peri," $500; the piano concerto, $125; Liederalbum,
op. 79, $200; "Manfred," $250. He frequently emphasizes his desire to
have his compositions printed in an attractive style, and in 1839
writes to Härtel that he cannot describe his pleasure on receiving the
"Scenes of Childhood." "It is the most charming specimen of musical
typography I have ever seen." The few misprints he discovers in it he
frankly attributes to his MS. In a letter to his friend Rosen he
writes that "it must be a deucedly comic pleasure to read my
Sanskrit." But his musical handwriting appears to have been nearer to
Sanskrit than his epistolary, if we may judge by the specimen
fac-similes printed in Naumann's "History of Music."