tricksy play of imagination, in which he took, as Oscar Bie says, "the
pleasure of the delicate man of taste in labelling." From about 1834,
when he founded his musical journal, the _Neue Zeitschrift für Musik_,
the imaginary society of the _Davidsbund_ played an important part in
his mental life. Believing that it was a part of his duty to oppose the
philistinism, the dulness, pedantry, and sensuality which pervaded the
music of the day, he dramatized the conflict as a struggle between the
_Davidsbund_, or club of Davidites, and the forces of Philistia. His
fancy played about this central conception until it had evolved a whole
company of Davidites, individualizing each one. Several were merely
single aspects of their creator's complex temperament. Florestan was
the impassioned Schumann, Eusebius the dreamy and tender Schumann, Raro
the philosophical mediator between the two. Others indicated friends:
Felix Meritis was Mendelssohn; Chiarina, Clara Wieck; Estrella,
Ernestine von Fricken, an early sweetheart. Once projected into the
actual world, these figments of fancy became very real to their
creator. His Sonata, opus 11, was originally printed as "by Florestan
and Eusebius." Each of the numbers of the "Davidsbündlertänze" is
signed "F.," or "E.," or "F. and E.," and the ascription is always
conscientiously justified by the character of the music. In the first
edition there are even "stage directions," such as, "Here Florestan
stops, his lips trembling painfully," and "Eusebius said too much about
this; but his eyes were full of joy." These finical particularities,
however, as well as the motto in verse, were in the second edition
stricken out.
All these elaborate paraphernalia with which Schumann equipped his
first essays in composition are noteworthy not so much for any
intrinsic significance as for the light they throw on his peculiar
attitude toward an art which most of his predecessors had approached
in a wholly objective and detached spirit. The persistent and minute
subjectivity they reveal is remarkable in so young a man, working by
instinct and in despite of the powerful influence of tradition. Most
men approach music through a systematic technical discipline, and
achieve individuality of style only with maturity; Schumann, reversing
the process, turns to music at first simply as to one of several
available ways of expressing a lively imagination, and gains technical
skill but gradually and by arduous effort. His eloquence is that of
a man filled with matter and enthusiasm, but untrained in oratory;
he stammers, hesitates, coins words, improvises phraseology as he
goes, and in the end attains fluency by dint of sheer earnestness and
conviction. The inner impulse to expression creates its own medium,
instead of being itself formed by the medium available; and while a
language thus derived offhand has necessarily certain crudities, it has
also, of course, a delightful freshness and happy spontaneity.
The inexhaustible tunefulness of the early Schumann is little
short of marvellous. Few composers have been so prodigal of lovely
melodies. They are like the king's daughters in the fairy tales,
each more beautiful than the last; and though there is doubtless a
family resemblance, each has a distinct physiognomy, a pronounced
individuality. They are, for the most part, indeed, brief, striking
motives rather than deliberately composed tunes, perfect but minute
crystals of most various shapes, forming spontaneously in the highly
saturated solution of the musical thought. No effort is made to purify,
separate, or collect them; what their composer seems chiefly to value
is their profusion and luxuriance. To state the same thing in more
technical terms, there is next to no thematic development; there is
simply the presentation of one charming phrase after another. The
result is of course a certain fragmentariness and whimsicality; the
music impresses us not by its cumulative power, its orderly advance,
but by the sheer charm of its primitive elements.
The vigor of the rhythms never flags. Short notes in "dotted rhythms,"
holds from unaccented to accented beats, and all manner of devices
for intensifying accentuation, give an inimitable elasticity to such
things as the first of the "Intermezzi," the sixth, seventh, ninth,
and final sections of the "Impromptus on a Theme of Clara Wieck,"
the ninth of the "Davidsbündlertänze," "Préambule," "Coquette,"
"Chiarina," "Valse Allemande," and the final march in the "Carnaval,"
"Aufschwung" in the "Phantasiestücke," and many others. There is
to be observed also a constant tendency to emphasize the metre by
slight but systematic deviations from it, such as syncopation and the
shifting of motives into artificial relations to the measure, and the
simultaneous use of two or more metrical schemes at once. Interesting
examples of this sort of intensive syncopation occur in "Grillen," one
of the "Phantasiestücke," in the B-flat major section of the eighth
"Novelette," and in the "Faschingsschwank aus Wien." A delightfully
quaint use of shifted motives is made in the finale of the Sonata,
opus 11. The theme of the movement, though written in triple measure,
consists entirely of two-beat motives, so that there is a constantly
felt, and very exciting, opposition between metrical and rhetorical
accents.
The motive of the scherzo of the same work is treated in a somewhat
similar way. Of all the many instances which might be mentioned
of a simultaneous use of two metrical schemes, one of the most
consummate is the employment, in "Des Abends," of three groups of two
sixteenth-notes in the melody, against two groups of three sixteenths
in the accompaniment--a subtlety often missed by pianists, but
essential to the charm of the piece. The first two numbers of the
"Davidsbündlertänze" also present attractive oppositions of metre.
[Illustration: score]
Figure VII.
The same waywardness finds further expression in certain harmonic
eccentricities. Schumann loves to surprise, waylay, disappoint, and
otherwise cajole his hearer. Strong unprepared dissonances, entrances
of chords before we expect them, delays of the expected ones, entire
evasions of the seemingly inevitable, and felicitous transitions into
the seemingly impossible are a constant feature of his program.
He loves to hit upon a note as if by accident, and then to justify
and even emphasize it, as in the eighth and succeeding measures of
the theme of the "Papillons"; to wound our ears with the harshest
intervals, and then compel our acquiescence by a resulting felicity,
as in the introduction to the F-sharp minor Sonata; to toss us
restlessly upon a chromatic sea and bring us out at last into diatonic
tranquillity, as in the first two pages of the "Toccata." At the
beginning of the "Kreisleriana" he keeps the right hand half a pace
ahead of the left, thus producing a great richness of tone as well
as emphasizing the vigorous progression of the bass. In the first
variation in opus 5 just the reverse of this occurs; the bass takes the
lead, while the chords in the right hand lag behind, making temporary
discords, but always coming out right in the end.
Many of these peculiarities of harmony are doubtless due simply to
Schumann's sensuous susceptibility to good ear-filling sound, long
intensified and developed by his habit of improvisation. Sir Hubert
Parry remarks that "he loved to use all the pedal that was possible,
and had but little objection to nearing all the notes of the scale
sounding at once. He is said to have liked dreaming to himself, by
rambling through all sorts of harmonies with the pedal down; and the
glamour of crossing rhythms and the sound of clashing and antagonistic
notes was most thoroughly adapted to his nature." There is, indeed,
evidence of this taste for rich tonal effects on almost every page of
his piano music. Like Chopin he finds a Mozartian clarity of sound
a little tame, and prefers to obscure the outlines of his consonant
chords by means of plentifully sprinkled dissonances; but while
Chopin, more fastidiously delicate, makes his dissonances float like
a diaphanous veil over the pure chords, Schumann, with true Teutonic
luxuriousness, fills up all the chinks and crannies with suspensions
and passing notes, and holds down the pedal to boot. His piano style
is much more massive than Chopin's. He has the true Johnsonian taste
for sonorousness and resonance. His ear is insatiably curious, too;
witness the final chord in the "Papillons," with its tones released
successively until but one remains sounding, the extraordinary clangor
of low thirds and final emergence of ghostly pianissimo chord at the
end of "Paganini" in the "Carnaval," and the many bizarre sonorities he
obtains by making the left hand play above the right, as in the second
of the "Abegg Variations" and in the section marked "Langsamer" in
number two of the "Kreisleriana."
Taken all together, these piano compositions of the decade 1830-1840,
which may be called the first period of Schumann's artistic life,
reveal an extraordinarily mobile and fanciful temperament, working
with the greatest freedom and spontaneity, though without the guidance
of regular discipline. Their crudities are undeniable: the flights
are short, the forms are fragmentary and often badly proportioned,
the style is highly subjective, eccentric, arbitrary. Yet there is in
these things such unflagging vitality, such rare and various beauty,
such abounding youthful enthusiasm and freshness, that one would
hardly sacrifice them for anything else that music has to offer, and
it has even been questioned whether in the final analysis there is
not more of the true Schumann in them than in the later, larger, and
more technically perfect works. In a sense Hans von Bülow was right in
saying that the _ipsissimus_ Schumann was to be found only in the early
works up to opus 50.
However this may be, it is certain that at about his thirtieth year
Schumann's artistic ideal began to undergo a gradual but radical
transformation. We see him in the compositions of this time paying
less and less attention to those purely personal whims and fancies
that had at first dominated his imagination, and beginning to work
very earnestly toward objective beauty and impersonal expression.
The fictitious characters, the mottoes, the stage directions, the
whole elaborate machinery of allusion to extra-musical interests,
are forgotten, and the interest of the music itself becomes all in
all. There had been already, among the works of his "storm and stress
period," single compositions in which the dramatic interest was wholly
subordinated to the musical, as, for example, the great "Toccata," opus
7, the "Allegro," opus 8, and the "Novelettes," opus 21; but now what
had been only occasional in the days when fancy and a self-involved
emotional life absorbed him grew to be normal and constant, and
he became for the first time a liberal and devoted artist. Of the
causes underlying this important change, the most fundamental was
doubtless simply increasing maturity. Youth is naturally and innocently
egotistical; the young man of sensibility loses himself in day dreams
and whimsical fancies, which have no basis in experience, and no
reference to anything beyond themselves; age brings a sense of the
values of real life, sobers and domesticates the passions, and enlarges
the interests until they spread from the self to all humanity. In an
artistic nature this general change of attitude involves a change
of artistic ideal; poignancy, intensity of expression, become less
valued than justice and proportion; the merely self-expressive comes
to seem trivial, and whimsicalities are discarded as interfering with
the serenity of a universal beauty. Schumann's change of attitude was
simply an unusually striking case of what happens to every perceptive
mind when experience has been sufficiently assimilated.
The anxieties, doubts, fears, and disappointments connected with his
courtship of Clara Wieck probably did more than anything else to
chasten and to steady his character at this time.[6] The two artists,
so diverse in talents, so remarkably at one in musical ideals, had
first met in Leipsic in 1828, when one was a law student and amateur
musician of eighteen, and the other an accomplished pianist, though
only nine years old. Their relation was for a while purely musical;
but as Clara's mind gradually developed, and especially after she
began to play Schumann's compositions, they discerned more and more
how deep-seated an artistic and personal congeniality was destined to
bind them together. It is most interesting to trace in his letters and
published music the successive steps of their comradeship. In 1832 he
composes his "Impromptus on a Theme of Clara Wieck"; in 1833 he writes:
"I have had a sympathetic idea, namely that to-morrow, exactly at
eleven o'clock, I shall play the Adagio from Chopin's 'Variations,'
and shall think intensely, exclusively, of you. My petition is that
you will do the same, so that we may meet and communicate in spirit;"
in 1834 he says: "When I am thinking of you very intently I invariably
find myself at the piano, and seem to prefer writing to you in
chords of the ninth, and especially with the familiar chord of the
thirteenth." "Chiarina," in the "Carnaval," written in 1835 and 1837,
is a musical portrait of the already beloved Clara, and the F-sharp
minor Sonata, dating from the same period, one of his most romantic and
impassioned works, is dedicated to her. The "Davidsbündlertänze" (1837)
opens with a motive by her, and in 1839, while he is busy with the
"Phantasie," he tells her, "I suppose you are the _Ton_ in the motto."
As time goes on, musical sympathy merges more and more into love. "The
'Davidsbündlertänze,' and 'Phantasiestücke,'" he writes in January,
1838, "will be finished in another week. There are many bridal thoughts
in the dances, which were suggested by the most delicious excitement
that I ever remember. My Clara will understand all that is contained
in the dances, for they are dedicated to her more emphatically than any
of my other things. The whole story is a Polterabend."[7] In April he
observes ingenuously, "I have just noticed that Ehe[8] [the German for
"marriage"] is a very musical word, and a fifth, too." A year later
he exclaims: "From your Romance I see plainly that we are to be man
and wife. Every one of your thoughts comes out of my soul, just as I
owe all my music to you.... Once I can call you mine you shall hear
plenty of new things.... And we will publish some things under _our two
names_, so that posterity may regard us as one heart and one soul, and
may not know which is yours and which mine. How happy I am!"
Meanwhile, however, the narrow selfishness of the father, Friedrich
Wieck, was raising all sorts of obstacles to this union. His daughter
being, by her playing in public, a source of financial gain to him,
he steadily opposed a marriage, as unfavorable to his interests. He
forbade the lovers to meet, circulated false and damaging stories of
Schumann, and when the couple, goaded to despair by his insensate
obstinacy, had resolved to take matters into their own hands, thwarted
even so radical a step by pretending to yield, but imposing conditions
that could not possibly be carried out. On the whole, considering his
impulsive temperament, Schumann bore this persecution with admirable
patience, though not without an occasional plaint. "Your father calls
me phlegmatic? 'Carnaval' and phlegmatic! F-sharp minor Sonata and
phlegmatic! Being in love with such a girl and phlegmatic! And you can
listen calmly to all this? He says that I have written nothing in the
_Journal_ for six weeks. In the first place, it is not true; secondly,
even if it were, how does he know what other work I have been doing?
Up to the present the _Journal_ has had about eighty sheets of my own
ideas, not counting the rest of my editorial work, besides which, I
have finished ten great compositions in two years, and they have cost
me some heart's blood. To add to all this, I have given several hours'
hard study every day to Bach and Beethoven, and to my own work, and
conscientiously managed a large correspondence. I am a young man of
twenty-eight, with a very active mind, and an artist to boot; yet for
eight years I have not been out of Saxony, and have been sitting still,
saving my money, without a thought of spending it on amusement or
horses, and quietly going my own way, as usual. And do you mean to say
that all my industry and simplicity, and all that I have done, is quite
lost upon your father?"
But all these difficulties and disappointments, all these occasions for
patience, tact, industry, loyalty, and self-control, painful as they
were to experience, were slowly transforming the capricious and dreamy
youth into a man of mature will and seasoned resourcefulness. "No man
is any use," says Stevenson, "until he has dared everything." Some
such conviction must have been in Schumann's mind when at last, early
in 1840, he resolved to avail himself of the law of Saxony that when
parents withhold their consent to a marriage without good reason, the
consent of the courts may be substituted. For such a man, so public a
step in so sacredly private a matter must have been doubly difficult;
to decide upon it must have involved a long mental turmoil. But he
did finally take his case to the courts, and eventually married Clara
Wieck, with the sanction of the law, in September, 1840. With this
manly and courageous action his youth may be said to have ended, and
the responsibilities, anxieties, labors, and sober joys of his manhood
to have commenced.
It thus happens that the last purely lyrical expression of his
essentially lyrical genius is to be found in the fine series of
songs which he poured forth in 1840. In the early months of this,
his "song-year," he was in a most sensitive and exalted state. The
prospect of attaining the goal so long vainly striven for had fired
his imagination to fever heat; and according to his habit he relieved
this excitement by incessant composition. "Since yesterday morning," he
writes in February, "I have written about twenty-seven pages of music
(something new), and I can tell you nothing more about it, except that
I laughed and cried over it with delight. Ah, Clara, what bliss it is
writing for the voice, and I have had to do without it for so long!"
This "something new" was the cycle of "Myrthen" songs, opus 25, among
which are "Widmung," "Der Nussbaum," "Die Lotosblume," "Du Bist wie
eine Blume," and others almost equally earnest, tender, and passionate.
With his first published songs (nine lyrics by Heine, opus 24) he sends
the message: "Here is a slight reward for your last two letters. While
I was composing these songs I was quite lost in thoughts of you. If I
were not engaged to such a girl, I could not write such music." "I have
been composing so much," he writes in May, "that it really seems quite
uncanny at times. I cannot help it, and should like to sing myself to
death, like a nightingale. There are twelve songs of Eichendorff's [the
'Liederkreis,' opus 39, containing the dramatic 'Waldesgespräch,' the
ethereal 'Mondnacht,' and the splendidly passionate 'Frühlingsnacht'],
but I have nearly forgotten them, and begun something else."
All together, over one hundred songs were produced during this single
year, including such immortal masterpieces as "Er, der Herrlichste
von Allen," "Im wunderschönen Monat Mai," "Ich grolle nicht," "Ich
hab' im Traum geweinet," and "Die Beiden Grenadiere," in addition
to those already mentioned. In general, the songs have the same
melodic freshness, richness of harmony, color, vigor of rhythm, and
individuality of style that distinguish the earlier piano works. It
is noteworthy, however, that in a certain directness of utterance, in
freedom from eccentricities of manner and perversity of fancy, and in
an increased breadth and coherence of structure, they show a distinct
advance. They mark, indeed, a point of transition in Schumann's career,
a point at which, still retaining the exuberance of youth, he has just
learned to direct and control it by means of a more efficient artistry,
and in the service of a maturer ideal. To most of his other works
a strict criticism has reluctantly to admit the pertinence, on one
side or the other, of the proverb "_Si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse
pouvait_"; but the songs seem as thoroughly achieved as they are
richly inspired.
After his marriage he turned to the larger forms of composition, which
he took up in a curiously methodical rotation. First came, in 1841,
three symphonies, the B-flat major, opus 38, the so-called "Overture,
Scherzo, and Finale," and the D-minor, published many years later as
opus 120. The piano concerto was also begun. In 1842 his interest was
shifted to chamber music, and the three quartets for strings, the piano
quartet, and the piano quintet appeared in rapid succession. Not until
1843 did he essay, in "Paradise and the Peri," a large choral work,
but thereafter several such works appeared from time to time. Thus we
see that while his more romantic compositions were for the most part
produced in the years of youth and courtship, he turned, when once he
had begun to face life as it is, in all its tragedy and difficulty
as well as its human beauty and sweetness, to the severer, grander
forms of music. In spite of the happiness he found in one of the most
perfect of marriages, we must remember that this union also involved
new responsibilities, anxieties, and distractions. It brought with
it novel social and professional duties, children to be protected,
guided, and helped, and above all the grinding routine by which the
daily bread of an artist has to be earned. How severe the conditions
were we have only recently learned from the complete biography of Clara
Schumann.[9] In her diary we read of the constant struggles of these
sensitive people to get the mere necessaries of life; of the husband's
steadily increasing ill-health, physical and mental, ending in insanity
and early death; of enforced migrations to Dresden and Düsseldorf in
search of more lucrative posts for him as an orchestral conductor, and
of the defeat of even these efforts by the incompetence of disease; and
of the wife's loyal resumption of concert playing, in order to fill the
family purse. All this experience of the sordid actualities with which
the world always tests its idealists was well calculated to make even
Schumann take a sober, and at times a tragic, view of life; and though
he is always noble and devoted, there is often in his chance remarks,
as years go on, a note of weariness, melancholy, or philosophic
resignation. It is not that he surrenders his ideals--only that he
finds them more difficult of realization than he had supposed in the
flush of youth, and under the buffets of fate retires somewhat into
himself, and chastens his enthusiasm into a stoical faith and a more
patient loyalty. This change of temper inevitably makes itself felt in
such characteristic music as the solemn introduction and the aspiring
adagio of the C-major Symphony, the mystical "Cathedral Scene" of the
"Rhenish Symphony," the sombre and restless "Manfred Overture," the
noble "Funeral March" in the Piano Quintet, and the infinitely tender
Andante grazioso of the Piano Concerto. The same sincere, simple nature
as ever is felt behind these things, but the stream of its emotion is
now more profound and quiet, as a river, when it reaches the plains, no
longer sparkles and bubbles, but flows tranquil and deep.
Technically, Schumann was handicapped in this new departure by his
exclusively pianistic early training. He had acquired a habit of
thinking in terms of the piano which it was almost impossible to
break, and he had not, like most symphonists, familiarized himself
with orchestral instruments from boyhood. The consequence was that he
made many blunders in his first essays in instrumentation, and never
scored with the ease, certainty, and effectiveness of a master. An
oft-cited instance is the opening horn-phrase of the first symphony,
originally written as at (_a_) in Figure VIII, in which form it is
grotesquely ineffective on account of the muffled quality, on the horn,
of the fifth and sixth tones, and changed only on second thought, after
rehearsal, to its present form, (_b_).
[Illustration: score]
(_a_)
[Illustration: score]
(_b_)
Figure VIII.