Robert Schumann's Literary Mind

“Away with music journals! The triumph and ultimate objective of a good one would be to achieve that high estate where people would read it for some higher reason than for want of anything better to do, or to have encouraged such musical productivity that the world would have neither the time nor the desire to read what is written about it. The music critic’s noblest destiny is to make himself superfluous! The best way to talk about music is to be quiet about it!”

From an 1836 Neue Leipziger Zeitschrift fur Musik article titled Chopin’s Piano Concertos, in a section attributed to “Florestan.”

Robert Alexander Schumann was born on June 8, 1810, one of five children of a Zwickau bookseller. Both in his creative and personal life, Robert Schumann embodied the Romantic ideal of the artist, with a precocious childhood, youthful wandering, strong and often nearly-tragic attachments to several women, and eventually, madness.

Schumann’s two main pursuits during his prime creative years were music composition, with a focus on piano and vocal music, and music criticism. In 1828, Schumann began composing and studying music in earnest in Leipzig where he studied piano with Friedrich Wieck. During breaks in his studies, Schumann travelled in Switzerland and Italy, and spent a year in Heidelberg . Upon return to Leipzig, Schumann began writing piano music for Clara Wieck, his teacher’s prodigy daughter, who was touring Europe. Clara and Robert later fell in love, and after a protracted legal battle with Friedrich, the two were married in 1840. Robert continued to write music and publish criticism until 1854, when his increasingly severe periods of mental instability (possibly due to late-stage syphilis) required commitment to an asylum.

Schumann, perhaps because of his bookseller father, had a long interest in criticism and literature. He began publishing articles on music in music and cultural journals in 1830. Three years later, he developed, with a group of friends, a music journal concentrating on the younger generation of performers and composers. The journal began publication as the Neue Leipziger Zeitschrift fur Musik in 1834, and in 1838 moved to Vienna under the name Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik.

In its look and content, the Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik had more in common with Victorian literary publications than with modern journalism. Schumann, giving free reign to his literary ambitions, employed a cast of imaginary characters to elucidate his thoughts on music. These included Meister Raro (based on Wieck), Zilia (Clara), and most significantly, Eusebius and Florestan, who represented two aspects of himself. Many of Schumann’s early essays are rapturous, poetic, and slightly fantastical meditations with music as a focal point. Even though there was some precedence for his style in the writings of ETA Hoffmann, Schumann’s approach was still considered somewhat eccentric by his readers. Schumann struggled throughout Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik’s existence to reconcile the evocative and technical approaches to music criticism, and often resorted to two-part articles where Florestan supplied the poetry and Eusebius the analysis. Despite his flights of fancy, Schumann and his journal became the leading voices in the Romantic music movement, which still represented the vanguard of music activity rather than the mainstream. As a champion of the Romantic, Schumann often wrote about what are now considered the era’s greatest composers, such as Chopin and Mendelssohn.

From Letters from a Music Lover, 1835, “Eusebius” describing Mendelssohn conducting the Leipziger Gewandhaus Orchestra:

“Then you should have seen Meritis [Mendelssohn] playing Mendelssohn’s Concerto in G minor! He sat down at the piano like an innocent child, and then took one heart captive after another, drawing them after him in droves. When he finally released them they knew only that they had been flown past a Greek isle of the gods and were now safely set down again in the concert hall in Firlenz [Leipzig].”

Also from Chopin’s Piano Concertos, but attributed to Eusebius:

“[Chopin] made his entrance, not with an orchestral army, as great geniuses do; he entered with a small following, but his own right down to the last hero. […] Thus he stood, equipped with profound knowledge of his art, confident of his own strength and armed with courage when, in the year 1830 the mighty voice of the people rose in the west. Hundreds of young men were awaiting this moment. But Chopin was one of the first to scale the wall, behind which lay a cowardly restoration, a dwarfish Philistinism fast asleep.”

by Stefanie Lubkowski
Publicity and Communications Manager
MM, New England Conservatory, 2007.

Sources:

Plantinga, Leon. Schumann as Critic. Yale University Press, New Haven. 1967.

Schumann, Robert. Henry Pleasants, editor. The Musical world of Robert Schumann: a selection from his own writings. Victor Gollancz, London. 1965.

Worthen, John. Robert Schumann: life and death of a musical genius. Yale University Press, New Haven. 2007.