Having finished with his Chopin group, the pianist is apt to follow it with his Schumann selections, and we meet with another original musical genius. Robert Schumann was born at Zwickau in June, 1810. His father was a book publisher and was in hopes that the son would show literary aptitude. In fact, the elder Schumann discouraged Robert’s musical aspirations; and as a result, instead of receiving early in life a systematic musical training, his education was along other lines. He studied law at Leipzig in 1828 and in Heidelberg in 1829, and was thus what is rare among musicians—a composer with an academic education.

His meeting with the celebrated pianoforte teacher, Frederick Wieck, the Leschetitzki of his day, determined Schumann to enter upon a musical career. Wieck took him into his home in Leipzig and he studied the pianoforte with a view of becoming a virtuoso. In order to gain greater freedom in fingering, he devised a mechanical apparatus by which one finger was suspended in a sling while the others played upon the keyboard. Unfortunately, through the use of this contrivance he strained the tendons of one hand and his dream of a virtuoso’s career vanished. Meanwhile he 135 had fallen in love with his teacher’s daughter, Clara Wieck, and finally, after determined opposition on the part of her father, married her in 1840. Later in life a brain trouble from which he had suffered intermittently became more severe, and in February, 1854, he became possessed of the idea that Schubert’s spirit had appeared to him and given him a theme to work out. He abruptly left the room in which he was sitting with some friends in his house at DÜsseldorf and threw himself into the Rhine. Some boatmen rescued him from drowning, but he had to be taken to an asylum near Bonn, where he died in July, 1856.

These circumstances in his life are mentioned here not only because of their interest, but because they explain some aspects of his music. Schumann was of a brooding disposition, intensely introspective. Compared with Chopin, his music lacks iridescence and shows a want of brilliancy. This will be immediately apparent if at a recital a pianist places the Schumann pieces after a Chopin group, as he is apt to do for the sake of the very contrast which they afford. But if Schumann’s compositions are wanting in superficially attractive brightness, they more than make up for it in their profounder characteristics. All through them one seems to hear a deep-sounding tone. One might say that his works for the keyboard instrument are pianoforte music for the viola, and for that reason they appear to me so expressive and so appealing. The harmonies are wonderfully compact. One feels after striking a Schumann chord like stiffening the fingers in order to hold it down more firmly, keep a grip on it, and let it sound to its last echo.

Poet, Bourgeois, and Philosopher.

In Schumann’s music the sensitive listener will find a curious blending of poet, bourgeois, and philosopher. He had the higher fancy, the warmth of the poet, a bourgeois love of what was intimate and homely, and the introspection of the philosopher. Sometimes he is so introspective that he appears to me actually to be burrowing in harmony like a mole. The melodies are interwoven; sometimes the upper voice flutters lightly down upon “contrapuntal collisions in the bass”; frequently his rhythms are syncopated; melodies are superimposed upon each other; he uses “imitations,” canonic figuration, and often by introducing a single note foreign to the scale, suddenly lowers or lifts an entire passage. There are interior voices in his music, half suppressed, yet making themselves heard now and then above the principal melody. He loves “anticipations”—advancing a single note or a few notes of the harmony and then filling in the sustained tone or tones with what was at first lacking. These characteristics are so marked that it is as easy to recognize Schumann as it is to distinguish Chopin in the first few bars of a work by either. Each is sui generis, each has his own hallmark, and it is a great thing in music, as in other arts, to have one’s product so personal that there can be no mistaking whose it is.

Schumann made valuable contributions to so-called program music. His pieces, besides intrinsic musical worth, have a distinct meaning, usually indicated by the titles he gives them. And these titles themselves often are suggested by the works of authors whom he admired, 137 or hark back to certain fanciful figures like harlequins and columbines. His second work for the pianoforte, “The Papillons,” derived its inspiration from the poet, Jean Paul, who was at that time an object of his intense worship. But whoever expects to find butterflies fluttering through these Schumann pieces will be mistaken. They are rather symbols of thoughts still in the chrysalis state and waiting, like butterflies, to cast off the shell and gain air and freedom. This symbolism must be borne in mind in listening to “The Papillons.”

Schumann himself said, in a general way, regarding his programmatic intentions in this and other works, that the titles given to his music should be taken very much like the titles of poems, and that, as in the case of poems, the music in itself should be beautiful, irrespective of title or printed explanation. This is true of all program music that has survived. It will be found beautiful in itself; but it also is easy to discover that the titles and explanations which are calculated to place the hearer in certain receptive moods vastly add to his enjoyment.

“Carnaval” and “Kreisleriana.”

I am always glad when a pianist elects to place the Schumann “Carnaval” on his program, because it is so characteristic of the composer’s method of work and of his writing short pieces en suite, giving a separate name to each of his diversions yet uniting them into one composition by means of a comprehensive title. The complete title to this work is “Carnaval ScÈnes 138 Mignonnes sur Quatre Notes pour Piano, Op. 9.” The four notes are A S C H, and in explanation it should be said that in German S (es) is E flat, and H the B of our musical scale. Asch was the birthplace of Ernestine von Fricken, one of Schumann’s early loves. Three of the divisions of the “Carnaval” are entitled Florestan, Eusebius, and March of the DavidsbÜndler. Schumann had founded the “Neue Zeitschrift fÜr Musik,” and he contributed to it under the noms-de-plume of Florestan, Eusebius and Raro; while his associates were denominated the DavidsbÜndler, it being their mission to combat and put to flight the old fogies of music, as David had the Philistines. Schumann himself is the looker-on at this carnival, a thinker wandering through the gay whirl, drawing his own conclusions, and noting down in music the varied figures as they pass, and his reflections on them. We meet Chopin and Paganini, each neatly characterized; Chiarina (the Italian diminutive of Clara) and Estrella (none other than Ernestine herself); also Harlequin, Pantalon, and Columbine. The DavidsbÜndler march in to the strains of the German folk-song,

and the whole ends in a merry uproar. He wrote another carnival suite, Opus 26, the “Faschingschwank aus Wien,” in which he introduced a suggestion of the “Marseillaise,” which was at that time forbidden to be played in Vienna.

The title of another work which ranks among his 139 finest productions, the “Kreisleriana,” also requires explanation. This he derived from a book by E. T. A. Hoffmann, who sometimes is spoken of as the German Poe, although he lacks the exquisite art of the American author—in fact, is a Poe bound up in much heavy German philosophy and turgid introspection. The Kreisler of Hoffmann’s book is an exuberant sentimentalist, and is said to have had his prototype in Kapellmeister Ludwig BÖhner, who, after a brilliant early career, had become addicted to drink and was reduced to maudlin memories of his former triumphs. In Hoffmann’s book there is a contrast drawn between this pathetic character, whose ideals have become shadows which he vainly chases, and the prosaic views of life as set forth by another character Kater Murr (literally Tomcat Purr). But these “Kreisleriana,” of which Bie says “the joys and sorrows expressed in these pieces were never put into form with more sovereign power,” should be entitled “Schumanniana,” for although the title is derived from Hoffmann, the content is Schumann.

Thoughts of His Clara.

Concerning the work as a whole he wrote to Clara while in the throes of composition: “This music now in me, and always such beautiful melodies! Think of it, since my last letter to you I have another entire book of new things ready. I intend to call them ‘Kreisleriana,’ and in them you and a thought of you play the chief rÔle, and I shall dedicate them to you. Yes, they belong to you as to no one else, and how sweetly 140 you will smile when you find yourself in them! My music seems to me so wonderfully interwoven, in spite of all its simplicity, and speaking right from the heart. It has that effect upon all for whom I play these things, as I now do gladly and often.” If Clara and a thought of Clara play the chief rÔle, what becomes of Kreisler and Kater Murr? Surely “Kreisleriana” are Schumanniana.

Full of varied characteristics are the “Fantasie Pieces.” Among these is the familiar “Warum,” which one has but to hear to recognize at once that it is no ordinary Why, but a question upon the answer to which depends the happiness of a lifetime; “At Evening” (Abends), with its sense of perfect peace; the buoyant “Soaring” (Aufschwung); “Whims” (Grillen); “Night Scene,” an echo of the legend of Hero and Leander; the fable, “Dream-Whirls” (Traumeswirren) and the “End of the Song,” with its mingling of humor and sadness. These “Fantasie Pieces” and the aptly named “Novelettes” seem destined always to retain their popularity. And then there are the “Scenes from Childhood,” to which belongs the “TrÄumerei”; the “Forest Scenes,” the “Sonatas;” the heroic technical studies, based on the Paganini “Capriccios,” and the “Études Symphoniques,” and the “Fantasie,” above the first movement of which he placed these lines from Schlegel:

Clara was the “tone,” as he told her. It was largely through Madame Schumann’s public playing of her husband’s works that they won their way. Even so, owing to their lack of brilliancy and their introspection, they were long in coming to their own. But the best of them, including, of course, the admirable “A Minor Concerto,” long will retain their hold on the modern pianist’s repertoire. William Mason went to Leipzig in 1849. “Only a few years before I arrived at Leipzig,” he says in his “Memories,” “Schumann’s genius was so little appreciated that when he entered the store of Breitkopf & HÄrtel with a new manuscript under his arm, the clerks would nudge one another and laugh. One of them told me that they regarded him as a crank and a failure because his pieces remained on the shelf and were in the way. * * * Shortly after my return from Germany (to New York) I went to Breusing’s, then one of the principal music stores in the city,—the Schirmers are his successors,—and asking for certain compositions by Schumann, I was informed that they had his music in stock, but as there was no demand for it, it was packed away in a bundle, and kept in the basement.” What a contrast now!