Robert Schumann, the loving critic, admirer, and disciple of Schubert in
the province of song, was in most respects a man of far different
type. The son of a man of wealth and position, his mind and tastes were
cultivated from early youth with the utmost care. Schumann is known
in Germany no less as a philosophical thinker and critic than as
a composer. As the editor of the _Neue Zeitschrift für Musik_, he
exercised a powerful influence over contemporary thought in art-matters,
and established himself both as a keen and incisive thinker and as a
master of literary style. Schumann was at first intended for the law,
but his unconquerable taste for music asserted itself in spite of family
opposition. His acquaintance with the celebrated teacher Wieck, whose
gifted daughter Clara afterward became his wife, finally established
his career; for it was through Wieck's advice that the Schumann family
yielded their opposition to the young man's bent.
Once settled in his new career, Schumann gave himself up to work with
the most indefatigable ardor. The early part of the present century was
a halcyon time for the _virtuosi_, and the fame and wealth that poured
themselves on such players as Paganini and Liszt made such a pursuit
tempting in the extreme. Fortunately, the young musician was saved from
such a career. In his zeal of practice and desire to attain a perfectly
independent action for each finger on the piano, Schumann devised some
machinery, the result of which was to weaken the sinews of his third
finger by undue distention. By this he lost the effective use of the
whole right hand, and of course his career as a _virtuoso_ practically
closed.
Music gained in its higher walks what it lost in a lower. Schumann
devoted himself to composition and aesthetic criticism, after he had
passed through a thorough course of preparatory studies. Both as a
writer and a composer Schumann fought against Philistinism in music.
Ardent, progressive, and imaginative, he soon became the leader of the
romantic school, and inaugurated the crusade which had its parallel in
France in that carried on by Victor Hugo in the domain of poetry. His
early pianoforte compositions bear the strong impress of this fiery,
revolutionary spirit. I lis great symphonic works belong to a later
period, when his whole nature had mellowed and ripened without losing
its imaginative sweep and brilliancy. Schumann's compositions for the
piano and orchestra are those by which his name is most widely honored,
but nowhere do we find a more characteristic exercise of his genius than
in his songs, to which this article will call more special attention.
Such works as the "Etudes Symphoniques" and the "Kreisleriana" express
much of the spirit of unrest and longing aspiration, the struggle to
get away from prison-bars and limits, which seem to have sounded the
key-note of Schumann's deepest nature. But these feelings could only
find their fullest outlet in the musical form expressly suited to
subjective emotion. Accordingly, the "Sturm and Drang" epoch of his
life, when all his thoughts and conceptions were most unsettled and
visionary, was most fruitful in lyric song. In Heinrich Heine he found
a fitting poetical co-worker, in whose moods he seemed to see a perfect
reflection of his own--Heine, in whom the bitterest irony was wedded to
the deepest pathos, "the spoiled favorite of the Graces," "the knight
with the laughing tear in his scutcheon"--Heine, whose songs are
charged with the brightest light and deepest gloom of the human heart.
Schumann's songs never impress us as being deliberate attempts at
creative effort, consciously selected forms through which to express
thoughts struggling for speech. They are rather involuntary experiments
to relieve one's self of some wo-ful burden, medicine for the soul.
Schumann is never distinctively the lyric composer; his imagination had
too broad and majestic a wing. But in those moods, peculiar to genius,
where the soul is flung back on itself with a sense of impotence, our
composer instinctively burst into song. He did not in the least advance
or change its artistic form, as fixed by Schubert. This, indeed, would
have been irreconcilable with his use of the song as a simple medium of
personal feeling, an outlet and safeguard.
The peculiar place of Schumann as a songwriter is indicated by his being
called the musical exponent of Heine, who seems to be the other half of
his soul. The composer enters into each shade and detail of the poet's
meaning with an intensity and fidelity which one can never cease
admiring. It is this phase which gives the Schumann songs their great
artistic value. In their clean-cut, abrupt, epigrammatic force there is
something different from the work of any other musical lyrist. So much
has this impressed the students of the composer that more than one
able critic has ventured to prophesy that Schumann's greatest claim to
immortality would yet be found in such works as the settings of "Ich
grolle nicht" and the "Dichterliebe" series--a perverted estimate,
perhaps, but with a large substratum of truth. The duration of
Schumann's song-time was short, the greater part of his _Lieder_
having been written in 1840. After this he gave himself up to oratorio,
symphony, and chamber-music.