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Robert Schumann[n 1] (German: [ˈʁoːbɛʁt ˈʃuːman]; 8 June 1810 – 29 July 1856) was a German composer, pianist, and music critic of the Romantic era. He left the study of law, intending to pursue a career as a virtuoso pianist. His piano teacher, Friedrich Wieck, had assured him that he could become the finest pianist in Europe, but a hand injury ended this ambition. Schumann then focused his musical energies on composing. In 1840 Schumann married Friedrich Wieck's daughter Clara Wieck, after a long and acrimonious legal battle with Wieck, who opposed the marriage. A lifelong partnership in music began, as Clara herself was an established pianist and music prodigy. Clara and Robert developed a close relationship with the composer Johannes Brahms.

Until 1840 Schumann wrote exclusively for the piano. Later, he composed piano and orchestral works, and many Lieder (songs for voice and piano). He composed four symphonies, one opera, and other orchestral, choral, and chamber works. His best-known works include Carnaval, Symphonic Studies, Kinderszenen, Kreisleriana, and the Fantasie in C. Schumann was known for infusing his music with characters through motifs, as well as references to works of literature. These characters bled into his editorial writing in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (New Journal for Music), a Leipzig-based publication that he co-founded.

Schumann suffered from a mental disorder that first manifested in 1833 as a severe melancholic depressive episode – which recurred several times alternating with phases of "exaltation" and increasingly also delusional ideas of being poisoned or threatened with metallic items. What is now thought to have been a combination of bipolar disorder and perhaps mercury poisoning led to "manic" and "depressive" periods in Schumann's compositional productivity. After a suicide attempt in 1854, Schumann was admitted at his own request to a mental asylum in Endenich (now in Bonn). Diagnosed with psychotic melancholia, he died of pneumonia two years later at the age of 46, without recovering from his mental illness.

Life and career edit

Childhood edit

 
Schumann's birth house, now the Robert Schumann House, after an anonymous colourised lithograph

Robert Schumann[n 1] was born in Zwickau, in the Kingdom of Saxony (today the state of Saxony), into an affluent middle class family.[4] The local newspaper carried the announcement, "On 8th June to Herr August Schumann, notable citizen and bookseller here, a little son".[5] He was the fifth and last child of August Schumann and his wife, Johanna Christiane (née Schnabel). August, not only a bookseller but also a lexicographer, author and publisher of chivalric romances, made considerable sums from his German translations of writers such as Cervantes, Walter Scott and Lord Byron.[2] Robert, his favourite child, was able to spend many hours exploring the classics of literature in his father's collection.[2] Intermittently, between the ages of three and five-and-a-half, he was placed with foster parents, as his mother had contracted typhus.[4]

At the age of six Schumann went to a private preparatory school, where he remained for four years.[6] When he was seven he began studying general music and piano with Johann Gottfried Kuntzsch, a teacher at a Zwickau school. Throughout his childhood and youth his love of music and literature ran in tandem, with poems and dramatic works produced alongside small-scale compositions, mainly piano pieces and songs.[7] He was not a musical child prodigy like Mozart or Mendelssohn,[4] but his talent as a pianist was evident from an early age: in 1850 the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (Universal Musical Journal) printed a biographical sketch of Schumann which included an account from contemporary sources that even as a boy he possessed a special talent for portraying feelings and characteristic traits in melody:

Indeed, he could sketch the different dispositions of his intimate friends by certain figures and passages on the piano so exactly and comically that everyone burst into loud laughter at the accuracy of the portrait.[8]

From 1820 Schumann attended Zwickau Lyceum, or Academy, the local high school of about two hundred boys, where he remained till the age of eighteen studying a traditional curriculum. In addition to his studies he read extensively: among his early enthusiasms were Schiller and Jean Paul. According to Hall, Paul remained Schumann's favourite author and exercised a powerful influence on the composer's creativity with his sensibility and vein of fantasy.[7] Musically, Schumann got to know the works of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and of living composers Weber, with whom August Schumann tried unsuccessfully to arrange for Robert to study.[7] August was not particularly musical but he encouraged his son's interest in music, buying him a Streicher grand piano and organising expeditions to Leipzig for a performance of Die Zauberflöte and Carlsbad to hear the celebrated pianist Ignaz Moscheles.[9]

 
Schumann c. 1826

University edit

August Schumann died in 1826; his widow was less enthusiastic about a musical career for her son and persuaded him to study for the law as a profession. After his final examinations at the Lyceum in March 1828 he entered Leipzig University. Accounts differ about his diligence as a law student. According to his room-mate Emil Flechsig, he never set foot in a lecture hall,[2] but he himself recorded, "I am industrious and regular, and enjoy my jurisprudence ... and am only now beginning to appreciate its true worth".[10] Nonetheless reading and playing the piano occupied a good deal of his time, and he developed expensive tastes for champagne and cigars.[7]

Musically, Schumann discovered the works of Franz Schubert, whose death in November 1828 caused Schumann to cry all night.[7] The leading piano teacher in Leipzig was Friedrich Wieck, who recognised Schumann's talent and accepted him as a pupil.[11]

Notes, references and sources edit

Notes edit

  1. ^ a b Many sources from the 19th century onwards state that Schumann had the middle name Alexander,[1] but according to the 2001 edition of Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians and a 2005 biography by Eric Frederick Jensen there is no evidence that he had a middle name and it is possibly a misreading of his teenage pseudonym "Skülander". His birth and death certificates and all other existing official documents give "Robert Schumann" as his only names.[2][3]

References edit

  1. ^ Liliencron, p. 44; Grove, p. 384 and Wolff p. 1702
  2. ^ a b c d Daverio, John and Eric Sams. "Schumann, Robert", Grove Music Online, Oxford University Press, 2001 (subscription required)
  3. ^ Jensen, p. 2
  4. ^ a b c Perrey, p. 6
  5. ^ Chissell, p. 1
  6. ^ Chissell, p. 3
  7. ^ a b c d e Hall, George. "Schumann, Robert", The Oxford Companion to Music, Oxford University Press, 2011 (subscription required)
  8. ^ Wasielewski (1869), p. 11 and (1871) pp. 18–19
  9. ^ Chissell, p. 4
  10. ^ Chissell, p. 16
  11. ^ Jensen, p. 22

Sources edit

  • Chissell, Joan (1989). Schumann (Fifth ed.). London: Dent. ISBN 978-0-46-012588-8.
  • Grove, George (1879). A Dictionary of Music and Musicians. London and New York: Macmillan. OCLC 1043255406.
  • Jensen, Eric Frederick (2012). Schumann. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-983068-8.
  • Liliencron, Rochus von (1875). Allgemeine deutsche Biographie (in German). Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot. OCLC 311366924.
  • Perrey, Beate (2007). "Schumann's lives, and afterlives". In Beate Perrey (ed.). Cambridge Companion to Schumann. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-139-00154-0.
  • Wasielewski, Wilhelm Joseph von (1869). Robert Schumann: eine Biographie (in German). Dresden: Kuntze. OCLC 492828443.
  • Wasielewski, Wilhelm Joseph von (1871). Life of Robert Schumann. Boston: Ditson. OCLC 1334933163.
  • Wolff, Anita, ed. (2006). Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Chicago: Britannica. ISBN 978-1-59339-492-9.
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