ROBERT SCHUMANN - HIS MUSICAL INFLUENCE
A Frenchman wisely noted that Schumann is the composer of youth. Beyond that, his music suggests eternal spring. Since he was born on June 8, 1810, what better way to celebrate than by paying respect with a few words and, hopefully, lots of his music. Elsewhere in this issue we offer the last installment in our series of Schumann Symphonies: No. 1 in B-flat, the "Spring," so forgive us if we are all excited and eager to share.
Probably no other composer captured the essence of the Romantic spirit so purely and, paradoxically, so sanely. For Schumann, "music is the ideal language of the soul." "I am affected by everything that goes on in the world and think it over in my own way ... and then I long to express my feelings and find an outlet for them in music. That is why my compositions are sometimes difficult to understand, because they are connected with distant interests; and sometimes striking, because everything extraordinary that happens impresses me, and impels me to express it in music.''
Of course there is much more to Romanticism than this, but the idea of music expressing something other than just itself is basic to an understanding of both the period and one of its foremost representatives.
Schumann is the composer of youth. Beyond that, his music suggests eternal spring. Since he was born on June 8, 1810, what better way to celebrate than by paying respect with a few words and, hopefully, lots of his music. Elsewhere in this issue we offer the last installment in our series of Schumann Symphonies: No. 1 in B-flat, the "Spring," so forgive us if we are all excited and eager to share.
Probably no other composer captured the essence of the Romantic spirit so purely and, paradoxically, so sanely. For Schumann, "music is the ideal language of the soul." "I am affected by everything that goes on in the world and think it over in my own way ... and then I long to express my feelings and find an outlet for them in music. That is why my compositions are sometimes difficult to understand, because they are connected with distant interests; and sometimes striking, because everything extraordinary that happens impresses me, and impels me to express it in music.''
Of course there is much more to Romanticism than this, but the idea of music expressing something other than just itself is basic to an understanding of both the period and one of its foremost representatives.
Help us celebrate. Get acquainted with Schumann. Start with a symphony, (perhaps No. 1 or No. 4) or the lovely piano concerto, or the magnificent Carnaval. Or make friends with works of his that you don't yet know. And if you know them all, introduce them to music lovers not so fortunate!
Schumann's Piano Music
Had Schumann not injured his hand permanently, he would have pursued a career as virtuoso. Fortunately for us this never came to pass, with the practical result that the executor became a creator. And what a creator he was! The first twenty-three published works are all piano compositions, mostly sets of small-scale character pieces but also numbering a few large sonatas and sonata-like works. Had Schumann written nothing else, his reputation would still be firmly established as a leading exponent of musical Romanticism, if not the ideal personification of it.
On the technical side, Schumann's contribution to piano music focuses on his development of the keyboard cycle. Just as Schubert had earlier created the song cycle as a unified collection of individual songs linked together in a variety of ways, Schumann brought together a series of relatively small pieces under one title, tying them together thematically, harmonically, rhythmically, and most important of all, psychologically, or emotionally if you prefer. Schumann's incredibly fertile imagination found poetic images in all his works (especially those of his early years, the period of the great piano works), and it is the discovery and identification of these allusions that creates the subtle connections among pieces on a cycle. A very obvious example is the wonderful Carnaval; less obvious, but perhaps yet more beautiful, is Kreisleriana. And what about the remarkable Davidsbundler Dances, with their cryptic references to Florestan and Eusebius, those literary manifestations of Schumann' s creative spirit? We all have our favorites.
Individually, the many pieces are typical of their time. The character piece was in the air in the nineteenth century. Beethoven wrote sets of bagatelles ("trifles"), Schubert gave us impromptus and Moments musicaux ("Musical moments"), Mendelssohn had his many Songs Without Words. Even the serious Mr. Brahms wrote highly personal intermezzi. They all share common features, most apparently an absence of elaborate development. The character piece is basically a miniature, although the content may reach the highest levels of profundity. Don't be fooled by size, for the smallest miniature may be far more difficult to write than the longest symphony.
Within the dimensions of small forms, Schumann created with the greatest variety. From little pieces he built up entire worlds, sets that have both contrast and balance, the essential requirements of good musical design. And always there is the poetic idea underlying both small piece and large suite of pieces.
Significantly, abstract forms held less interest for him. Thus, the three sonatas, for all their attractiveness, cannot succeed the way Fantasiestucke, Papillons or even the Symphonic Variations do. As Schumann grew older he tended to minimize the extra-musical inspirations for his works, sometimes going so far as to restrain earlier Romantic impulses in actual revisions. From our viewpoint, what he gained in compositional technique he perhaps sacrificed in simple spontaneity. Part of this is also the result of his giving up improvising for composing away from the piano altogether.
We can all find something to suit our own personal tastes in Schumann's piano music: children still delight in the Album for the Young (written for his own children); students will want to tackle the brilliant Toccata or demanding Paganini Studies; the rest of us have a long list to choose from.
Schumann's Songs
1840, the year of his marriage, found Schumann literally bursting into song. Until that time he had considered vocal music with something less than enthusiasm. In fact, he regarded it as inferior. This is curious, for Schumann was a highly cultivated man of letters, a writer himself who nearly chose a career of words rather than notes. But once he got his feet wet, there was nothing to stop an incredible outpouring of one masterpiece after another. In that one year alone he wrote 138 songs, among them the great cycles that rank him with Schubert and Wolf as a supreme master of the genre.
The reasons for Schumann's preeminence in song composition: he simply wrote beautiful songs; he had the special ability to sense a poem's inner meaning, its essence, and then fashion the most ideal musical setting for it; he achieved an integration of parts--voice and piano--where complete interdependence of the two is characteristic. Anyone at all familiar with even a few Schumann songs will find numerous examples to back up these claims.
Of the many poets whose verses Schumann set, Heinrich Heine and Joseph von Eichendorff furnished the kind of material that most effectively stimulated his imagination. Heine's poetry especially seems to cry out for musical elaboration, if not explicit tonal setting, as a reading through Dichterliebe (Poet 's Love) makes abundantly clear. And the composer 's imagination responded appropriately. Moreover, at the height of his powers Schumann could create a minor masterpiece of even less than great poetry, by purely musical means.
In writing a song a composer can give free rein to pictorial devices. If anything, they are actually called for. Nature motifs in particular play a very large role in Romantic poetry, consequently also in song settings. German Romanticism cultivated forest images at almost every opportunity, from the famous Wolf's Glen scene in Weber 's Der Freischutz to the miniature horns in Schumann 's Op. 39, No. 3, entitled "Waldesgesprach" (Forest Dialogue ). His songs abound in wonderful examples, and the listener will delight in discovering them as increased familiarity allows.
Finally, let’s not forget that the piano remained central for Schumann. In some songs the voice begins a melody only to have it end in the keyboard part. In others, the voice has a subsidiary role, melodically. And, in what is the most obvious--and perhaps also the most beautiful- -instance, there is the magnificent postlude at the close of Dichterliebe a perfect illustration of the composer's final reversion to his instrument after the singer has given the last line of text.
Schumann 's Orchestral Music
In 1841 Schumann turned his attention to the orchestra. And in characteristic fashion he put on paper no less then two complete symphonies, a symphonic work of three movements, and a fantasy for piano and orchestra , later to become the first movement of the Piano Concerto. The next year brought on a rash of chamber works, a return to the orchestra coming in late 1845 with remaining movements of the piano concerto and Symphony No. 2. Again a gap, and then two concerted works in 1849: Concertstuck for four horns and orchestra and Introduction and Allegro appassionato (Concertstuck) for piano and orchestra. 1850, the year of his appointment as conductor in Dusseldorf, brought the last symphony and Cello Concerto. Three concert overtures date from 1851, and in 1853 there were the two concerted works for violin and the Introduction and Allegro in D for piano and orchestra. If we include an early (1832) symphonic effort in G Minor, which remained unpublished, then the claim can be made that Schumann wrote orchestral works over his entire creative career, primarily during the potent year 1841 and again at the later stage of development.
Schumann was too great a musician and too respectful of symphonic traditions to allow the symphonic form to become simply a vehicle for programmatic, descriptive pieces in orchestral garb. When he set about to write a symphony it was with acute awareness of Beethoven, Schubert and the classic tradition altogether, and his position in relation to them. Yet, the extra-musical, poetic idea or stimulus for his creative energies so dominated, that it should come as no surprise that Symphony No. 1 has a subtitle, "Spring, " and originally there were names for each movement, deleted by the composer before publication. Surely these titles came after the fact, and the music of course stands on its own without them. But the point is, Schumann remained true to the Romantic impulse in composing his first symphony. Interestingly, the next three symphonic works appear more abstract (although appearances may be deceptive), and only in the last symphony, the "Rhenish," did he give in to descriptive elements.
Aside from the obvious Romantic infusion of programmatic possibilities in his symphonies--which, it should be emphasized, already plays a significant role in Beethoven 's symphonies, sometimes even Haydn 's- -are there any elements in Schumann 's orchestral works that make them important in an historical sense? (Or is it enough that) they are just wonderful to hear? Without doubt, after Beethoven there was little really new under the symphonic sun, except for peculiarities of composers' individual style. Technical and formal innovations of the Romantic period invariably trace themselves back to the Bonn master. Still, Schumann did make some noteworthy contributions of his own: the First Symphony's scherzo has two contrasting trios (shades of the eighteenth-century divertimento, however); the second symphony--known as No. 4, since it was withheld until 1851 when it was completely rescored and reworked--was actually conceived as a symphonic fantasia, in one movement and comes down to us with the direction that all movements follow without break; each of its sections contains thematic elements of the opening introduction ; Symphony No . 2 in C, makes use of a recurring "motto", that gives a unity somewhat related to Berlioz ' famous idee fixe. For those who take delight in technical details, we mention only Schumann 's very clever use of polymeter (two constrasting time signatures used simultaneously) in this work’s finale.
As if well aware of his natural tendency toward episodic sometimes loosely-organized musical forms, such as we often find in his piano music, Schumann made, as did many nineteenth-century composers, a deliberate effort to achieve unity in large-scale works. The D-Minor Symphony represents the ultimate achievement in this regard, as mentioned above, but we find similar approaches in the concerti, where movements are often linked together without pause.
Finally, and most important of all, Schumann’s orchestral works are beautiful. In spite of occasional miscalculations in scoring (there are however many extremely wonderful, touches of instrumentation that suggest that Schumann was not simply insensitive to orchestral sonorities) and also occasional loss of control of musical form, especially in the later works, the symphonies and concertos succeed by their sheer lovliness of ideas, vitality of rhythms , and everfresh spontaneity.