Musicians - Robert Schumann

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	Musicians - Robert Schumann

Robert Schumann (June 8, 1810 – July 29, 1856) was a German composer and pianist. He was one of the most famous Romantic composers of the first half of the 19th century. An intellectual as well as an aesthete, his music, more than any other composer, reflects the deep personal nature of Romanticism. Introspective and often whimsical, his early music was an attempt to break with the tradition of classical forms and structure which he thought too restrictive. Little understood in his lifetime, much of his music is now regarded as daringly original in harmony, rhythm and form. He stands in the front rank of German Romantics.

Biography

Early life

He was born on June 8, 1810 in Zwickau in Saxony. His father was a publisher, and it was in the cultivation of literature quite as much as in that of music that his boyhood was spent. He himself tells us that he began to compose before his seventh year.

At fourteen he wrote an essay on the aesthetics of music and also contributed to a volume edited by his father and entitled "Portraits of Famous Men." While still at school in Zwickau he read, besides Friedrich Schiller and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Lord Byron and the Greek tragedians. But the most powerful as well as the most permanent of the literary influences exercised upon him, however, was undoubtedly that of Johann Paul Friedrich Richter. This influence may clearly be seen in his youthful novels "Juniusabende" and "Selene", of which the first only was completed 1826.

In 1828 he left school, and after a tour, during which he met Heinrich Heine in Munich, he went to Leipzig to study law. His interest in music had been stimulated when he was a child by hearing Ignaz Moscheles play at Carlsbad, and in 1827 his enthusiasm had been further excited by the works of Franz Schubert and Felix Mendelssohn. But his father, who had encouraged the boy's musical aspirations, had died in 1826, and neither his mother nor his guardian approved of a musical career for him.

The question seemed to be set at rest by Schumann's expressed intention to study law, but both at Leipzig and at Heidelberg, whither he went in 1829, he neglected the law for the philosophers, to use his own words, "but Nature's pupil pure and simple" began composing songs.

1830-1834

The restless spirit by which he was pursued is disclosed in his letters of the period. On Easter, 1830 he heard Paganini at Frankfurt. In July in this year he wrote to his mother, "My whole life has been a struggle between Poetry and Prose, or call it Music and Law," and by Christmas he was once more in Leipzig, taking piano lessons with his old master, Friedrich Wieck.

In his anxiety to accelerate the process by which he could acquire a perfect execution, he permanently injured his right hand. Another authority states that the right-hand disability was caused by syphillis medication. Those who claim the former state that he attempted a radical surgical procedure to separate the tendons of the fourth finger from those of the third (the ring finger musculature is linked to that of the third finger, thus making it the "weakest" finger). Regardless, his ambitions as a pianist being suddenly ruined, he determined to devote himself entirely to composition, and began a course of theory under Heinrich Dorn, conductor of the Leipzig opera. About this time he contemplated an opera on the subject of Hamlet.

Papillons

The fusion of the literary idea with its musical illustration, which may be said to have first taken shape in Papillons (op. 2), is foreshadowed to some extent in the first criticism by Schumann, an essay on Chopin's variations on a theme from Don Juan, which appeared in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung in 1831. Here the work is discussed by the imaginary characters Florestan and Eusebius (the counterparts of Vult and Walt in Jean Paul's novel Flegeljahre), and Meister Raro (representing either the composer himself or Wieck) is called upon for his opinion.

By the time, however, that Schumann had written Papillons (1831) he had gone a step further. The scenes and characters of his favourite novelist had now passed definitely and consciously into the written music, and in a letter from Leipzig (April 1832) he bids his brothers "read the last scene in Jean Paul's Flegeljahre as soon as possible, because the Papillons are intended as a musical representation of that masquerade."

In the winter of 1832 Schumann visited his relations at Zwickau and Schneeberg, where he performed the first movement of his Symphony in G minor (which remains unpublished). In Zwickau, the music was played at a concert given by Wieck's daughter Clara, who was then only thirteen. The death of his brother Julius as well as that of his sister-in-law Rosalie in 1833 seems to have affected Schumann with a profound melancholy.

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