Robert Schumann

Robert Schumann was a German composer of the mid-19th century, who, although famed primarily for piano music and songs, developed a wide repertory of chamber, orchestral, choral, and dramatic works. Schumann completely transformed piano repertory with titled works capturing scenes and personalities of his own imagining which are totally distinctive when compared to the standard genre titles of most contemporaneous piano music. They came to be regarded as expressive of a new “domesticated” Romanticism, one of a very personal kind, that would flourish with increasingly wide publication. Schumann’s songs also gave an entirely more important role to the piano in capturing the expressive meaning of the poetry he selected, much of which was written by his contemporaries, some of whom he knew personally. The style of his orchestral and chamber music is often termed “Classical Romantic” because of the ease with which he blends traditional forms with Romantic feeling, yet always there is something special in the form.  

Early Years: A Budding Young Musician

Born into a prosperous family of book publishers in the Saxon town of Zwickau in 1810 (the youngest  of five children), Schumann was immersed in literature from childhood but received scant musical education and was largely self-taught: improvisation at the piano revealed a gift for capturing characterization in music. He rejected the lawyer career intended for him in Leipzig and instead began to study piano there at age 20.

Middle Period: Scenes and Fantasies

Supported by a family allowance, Schumann became quickly and deeply absorbed in Leipzig’s musical life and established himself as a critic, editing his own Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (“New Musical Newspaper”) with the agenda of organizing a resistance to the “Philistines” he perceived as composers of facile, or display, music. His work as a composer unfolded in several successive phases, the first and longest of which was taken up entirely with music for his own instrument, the piano. He grouped many of his numerous short character pieces into scenes or fantasias: for example Kinderszenen (“Scenes from Childhood”) (1838), picturing domestic life, or Carnaval (1833–35), displaying characters from literature or from his own close artistic community, including himself in several guises. After his marriage in 1840 to Clara Wieck, his piano teacher’s brilliant pianist daughter, he turned intensely to composing songs, writing over 100 that year, many in cycles devoted to single poets or in settings of poetic works, such as much of Heinrich Heine’s Book of Songs. In 1841 his long-held desire for larger forms produced orchestral works, including his first symphony and the first movement of the piano concerto, which originally appeared as a fantasia. In 1842 he revealed his first chamber works with piano, and, just a year later, he wrote his first large-scale choral work, the secular oratorio Das Paradies und die Peri (“Paradise and the Peri”).

Schumann: Quintet in E-flat major for Piano, Two Violins, Viola, and Cello, Op. 44

Late Period: An Early Decline

His five years in Dresden (1845–50) were the most prolific of his life. Expanding ambition led to dramatic works of varied kinds, including the opera Genoveva (1847–50) and settings of “Scenes” from both parts of Goethe’s Faust (1844–1853). A large number of smaller choral works was written for the huge choral market, seemingly to provide income for his constantly growing family. His final years as conductor of the Düsseldorf Symphony Orchestra were marred by his withdrawn public personality: he had suffered from depression all his life and spoke little, though he wrote much. Composition came to a sudden end with a depressive episode leading to his attempted suicide and two years in a sanatorium, where he gradually lost his reason. Doctors dissuaded Clara from visiting him, and she was only with him briefly before he died—a subject much conjured by later biographers. 

Legacy

Schumann’s music had an immediate impact on the younger generation of instrumental composers. Johannes Brahms’s music is unimaginable without it; Clara Schumann spent her many years of widowhood promoting her husband’s music through performance and publication. She, along with Brahms,  the violinist Joseph Joachim, and their circle, had little time for the aesthetics and musical values of the “New German School”—Franz Liszt, Richard Wagner, and their followers. They helped to reinforce Schumann’s culture of reverence for classical music as an elevated art that was profoundly influential in the later Romantic era, not least in the most intimate forms of chamber and piano music, and not only in Germany; French composers such as Georges Bizet and Gabriel Fauré drew naturally on Schumann in such works as Jeux d’enfants and Dolly.

All Schumann’s music is now part of the standard repertory, even the choral and dramatic music for which fashions changed after the 19th century. His piano music continues to represent a technical challenge to players—less natural in execution than that of his exact contemporary Frédéric Chopin—and the songs have provided the occasion for some of the greatest lieder performances. Though Schumann’s work in other genres (with the exception of the piano concerto) were slower to public acclaim, his orchestral and chamber works now occupy a special place in the “classical” tradition.

Watching and Listening

Schumann’s first published chamber work, the Piano Quintet for piano and string quartet (1842), is also his most famous, showing instant spontaneity, yet within a very focused structure. The soaring opening theme is pure Schumann, but the second movement is an ominous march and the third a wild Scherzo, both full of contrasts. The coda to the finale perfectly concludes the work, uniting first and last movement themes.     

Though Schumann continued in chamber forms (a piano quartet, three piano trios, and three string quartets), a distinctive contribution to the chamber literature is in his many collections of short pieces for single instruments with piano—for oboe (Three Romances, 1849), clarinet (Fantasiestücke, 1849), horn (Adagio and Allegro, 1849), viola (Märchenbilder, 1851), and cello (5 Stücke im Volkston, 1849). In 1853 he combined viola and clarinet in four “Fairytales” (Märchenerzählungen), Op.132, of contrasting characters: reflective, strident, folklike, yet without any titles; Schumann here leaves the tales to the listener’s imagination.

This late inclination towards pure (non-programmatic) music comes into full focus in the three violin sonatas of the 1850s. The second of these is a “Grand Sonata,” also published in 1853, with four movements which reveal a new side of Schumann as a chamber composer. The first movement is in a very expansive sonata form, in which piano and violin interact in a passionate flow of constantly evolving lyricism. The driving  scherzo alternates two contrasting ideas and ends quoting a chorale, on which the third movement constructs variations beginning with a muted effect on piano to match the hushed pizzicato of the violin and followed by a vibrant finale. Like its companions, this work looks towards Brahms in treating chamber forms as a major means of expression.

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